Designing Web Pages

Web pages are multimedia documents that provide information and contain links to other documents on the Internet, an intranet, a local network, or a hard disk. These links ”also called hyperlinks , hypertext , or hypermedia ”are highlighted text or graphics that you click to follow a pathway from one Web page to another. Linked Web pages, often called a Web site , are generally related by topic.

Web pages are based on Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) ”a simple coding system used to format Web pages. A browser program, such as Microsoft Internet Explorer, interprets these special codes to determine how a certain Web page should be displayed. Different codes mark the size, color , style, and placement of text and graphics as well as which words and graphics should be marked as hyperlinks and to what files they link.

As the World Wide Web becomes a household word and many businesses create intranet and Internet Web sites ”both of which use HTML documents ”the ability to create, read, open , and save HTML documents directly from Office becomes an important time saver.

HTML and Office 2003

Office 2003 uses HTML as a companion file format. That means that Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint, and Publisher all can save and read HTML documents without any compatibility problems. Additionally, Office recognizes the .html filename extension as accurately as it does those for its own programs (.doc, .xls, .mdb, .ppt, and .pub). In other words, you can use the familiar Office tools and features you use to create printed documents to create and share Web documents. Anyone with a browser can view your Office Web documents.

Converting Documents to Web Pages

In addition to creating Web pages from scratch in Office programs, you can also save any existing document as a Web page to your hard disk, intranet, or Web server. These HTML documents preserve such features as styles, revision marks, PivotTables, linked and embedded objects, and so forth. When the layout or an item in your document can't be converted to HTML in exactly the same way, a dialog box explains what items will be changed and how.

Each Office file saved as HTML creates a handful of individual files. For example, each graphic, worksheet, or slide in an Office document becomes its own file. To make it easy to manage these multiple files, Office creates a folder with the same name , and in the same location, as the original HTML file for the document. Any Office document saved as a Web page consists of an HTML file and a folder that stores supporting files, such as a file for each graphic, worksheet, slide, and so on.