Perhaps the most dramatic new feature of Office 2000 is the ease with which you can create and publish documents for a variety of media—print, electronic, or to the Internet or an intranet. This chapter focuses on composing and publishing Web pages, the documents that you publish to the Internet or to an intranet. In a word, creating a Web page is as simple as creating a document in any Office program—Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, and even Outlook—and simply saving it as a Web page.
Notes: Chapter 25 briefly introduces the Web publishing component of Internet Explorer, FrontPage Express. If you purchased the Premier version of this book, Chapters 33 and 34 describe the web publishing program FrontPage.
As you may know, a Web page needs to be in HTML (HyperText Markup Language) format in order to be viewed in a Web browser such as Internet Explorer. In the early days of the Internet and Web browsing, you needed a working knowledge of HTML to create Web pages. Later in this chapter, we’ll take a look at such a page. As you’ll see, it involves some rather complicated-looking coding. With Office 2000, however, just about all you need to know about HTML is that it exists and that Office programs rather easily convert any documents you create into the HTML format. Documents you create in Word, for example, retain nearly their exact same format when you save them as HTML files, and later reopen them in Word.
In the first part of this chapter, we’ll look at those Web publishing features common to most Office components, and then we’ll look at the features that are specific to each component.
When you save an Office document as a Web page, you use the Save As dialog box, just as you do when you save a document to your hard drive. Using this dialog box, you can save a Web page directly to a Web server (if you have access to one and have set up a Web folder).
You use the Web Folders shortcut on the Places bar in the Save As dialog box to save, open, and manage Web pages. When you click on Web Folders, you see a list of the Web servers you’ve saved. If your list is empty and you want to publish Web pages, you might need to have access to a web server that you can publish pages to. Then you need to set up a Web folder following these steps:
When you open or save a file to a Web server, Office 2000 automatically creates Web Folders shortcuts. To manage the files you’ve placed on a Web server, open Windows Explorer, double-click the Web Folders icon, and then double-click the Web server’s icon. You can browse and work with your Web Folders in Internet Explorer the same way you browse and work with files and folders on your computer.
TIP: At any stage while you’re creating an Office document, you can see what it will look like when displayed in your Web browser. Simply choose the File menu’s Web Page Preview command.
1. After you create and format your document, follow these steps: From the File menu, choose Save As Web Page to open the Save As dialog box, as shown in Figure 6-1.
2. In the File name box, type a file name for your Web page.
3. If you want to change the proposed page title (the title that will be displayed when the page is opened in a browser), click the Change button to open the Set Page Title dialog box. Enter a new title in the Page title box and click OK.
4. Choose a location on your hard drive to save the file or click the Web Folders icon, and select a web server to publish the document.
5. If you choose to publish your file to the web server, enter your user name and password, and then click the Save button. Note: In the later sections of this chapter, we’ll look at how you use the various Office components to create Web pages. You’ll find more information in Chapter 24, Working with Web Components.