Customizing Deployment Settings

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For a custom-written solution, you can control the file path used in the codebase attribute and you can control what is written in the alternate HTML section of your <object> tags. However, if your solution allows users to publish interactive content from Microsoft Excel 2000, you might want to control the codebase path and alternate HTML automatically inserted by Excel.

Excel, Microsoft FrontPage, and Microsoft Access all use the contents of a registry key for the value of the codebase attribute. The key is found under:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\9.0\Common\ Internet\LocationOfComponents

Changing the contents of this key will alter what Excel, FrontPage, and Access write for the codebase attribute of any Office Web Component.

When publishing interactive content, Excel 2000 will insert a short HTML fragment into the alternate HTML section of any <object> tag for a Spreadsheet, Chart, or PivotTable control. By default, the English version of this HTML is as follows:

 <p style='margin-top:100;font-family:Arial;font-size:8.0pt'> To use this Web page interactively, you must have Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.01 or later and the Microsoft Office Web Components <span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>See the <a HRef="http://officeupdate.microsoft.com/office/redirect/ fromOffice9/MSOWCPub.htm?&amp;HelpLCID=1033"> Microsoft Office Web site</a> for more information.</p> 

This text has a hyperlink to the Microsoft Office Update web site for more information, but in your solution, you might want to instead direct users to the installation page discussed earlier. To substitute your own text, add the following registry key and set the key's value to your custom text:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\9.0\Common\ Internet\MissingComponentText

Unfortunately, I discovered in my own testing that this value is always HTML encoded when written into the published page. HTML encoding transforms an HTML tag such as <a> into &lt;a&gt; so that it is no longer an HTML tag but is instead interpreted as literal text. This means you cannot include HTML tags in the value for this registry key because they will not be correctly written to the page. Therefore, you are limited to plain text without any hyperlinks or formatting.