Viewing and Editing Office Documents in a Web Browser

You don't have to convert Office documents into Web format to post them on a Web server. A Web page designer can create a hyperlink that points directly to a Word document, Excel workbook, or PowerPoint presentation saved in its native format. When you open that page and click the link, Internet Explorer displays a security warning like the one shown here.

If you have a copy of the application that created the document installed on your computer, you can click Open and the file will appear within the browser win­dow. (In technical terms, Internet Explorer is acting as a "container" for the Office program.) The contents of the document look just as if they were appearing in the program window. You can scroll through the pages of a Word document, click tabs to switch between work­sheets in an Excel workbook, and view a PowerPoint presentation complete with slick transition effects. But there are some noteworthy differences:

• The toolbar buttons con­trol browser functions, but the pull-down menus are from the program that actually opened the document—in this case, Excel. Internet Explorers Favorites menu is shoehorned between the Edit and View menus, Excels Window menu is missing (because you can't open multiple documents in a browser container), and you can choose from two Help menus— one for Internet Explorer, the other for Excel.
• Normally, the toolbars for the program that created the document are hidden. To make them visible, as they are in this example, click the Tools button on Internet Explorer's toolbar.
• If you edit a document within a browser window, be careful. If you exit the page, your changes are discarded without being saved. If you use the Save button on the creating pro­gram's toolbar, it has no effect, nor will you be able to save the changed document to the Web server where it's stored. The only way to preserve your changes is to choose File, Save As and save a copy of the document in a location where you have read-write permissions.

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