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Converting Word .docs/.docx to Web Pages

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Word is a word processing application. It is used for paper documents. How can you use Word docs on the web or in Vista without retyping them in Vista's HTML Editor or learning a web editor (like Seamonkey).

Unline word, Vista is a web-based system. It displays web pages in web browsers. To use text documents you have made in word in Vista, you must change the format to one which can be viewed in a web browser. That is, you must change a .doc or .docx to a web page, or to HTML, the code that underlies all web pages.

You can save Word docs as web pages, but remember, Word is for paper documents. It was not designed to produce web pages. Because of this, although you CAN save word docs as web pages, the pages created this way may NOT appear correctly, or at all, in a web browser. In the final analysis, you will have to try saving your Word files using the steps below, upload them to Vista, and view them in BOTH Internet explorer and Firefox (the web page may be visible in one browser, but not in another).

The first thing to do is clean up your Word doc. The simpler your original word doc, the more likely it is to appear correctly in a web browser after you have saved it in Word as a web page.

When saving a Word document as HTML, be sure to save as "Web Page, Filtered (*htm, html*)"

Do NOT use save it as a "Web Page" (this leaves in a lot of the complex code Word writes to turn a paper document into a web page). Vista will not display web pages saved in this format.

When you save as Web Page Filtered, the underlying code will be much cleaner, the file size is significantly smaller, and most, if not all, of the look and feel of the original document is retained.

web 
page filtered

But you will still need to upload the resulting web page (it will have .html instead of .doc after the file name) to your Vista page and look at it in several web browsers to make sure it is visible. Do this in Student view in Vista.

What if the web page doesn't show up in a browser in Vista?

There is a chance that the resulting web page (the result of saving your .doc as Web Page Filtered) may not appear correctly when you look at it in Vista. If the file is very small (up to 20Kb in size), you can try uploading it to "Word HTML Cleaner." You browse for the html file, upload it, and after processing it, Word HTML cleaner sends it back to your computer, where you can try the modified file in a browser after you've uploaded it to Vista.

You can also try HTML Page Cleaner 1.1

And if it still doesn't work...

If the file shows consistently in one browser and not in another, tell your users to use the browser in which it works. This is a shabby kluge... but if you really, really don't want to prepare the file correctly, it IS an option.

One more idea

There is one way to clean up Microsoft html, but you will have to download Dreamweaver (30-day free-trial) and use the "Clean up Word html Command".

If this is your only option and you have lots of big word files, you can process them all at once (or at least in 30-days). there is also a copy of Dreamweaver on the computser in the IRC (F-226) on Floyd campus.

Page last updated: March 11, 2010