Timesaver or Trouble Maker: Creating HTML files from Microsoft™ Word

The vast majority of Windows users are familiar with Microsoft™ Word. It is a full featured word processing program. It can also save files as HTML files for web viewing. In fact many people have used this feature of the software. But there are major drawbacks to doing so.

When you save a regular Word file using the "Save as" command, two of the choices in the Save as Type drop down box are "Save as web page" and "Save as web page filtered". The difference between the two is that Word places a few less HTML codes in the "filtered" option. But overall, when word saves a file in HTML, it is going to *a lot* of extraneous HTML tags within it (they are used to maintain formatting, bullets, typefaces, and so on). This may not seem like a problem, as in many cases the file will look acceptable in your web browser. The problem kicks in when you have to update or change these files. Wading through the mountains of codes can be very time consuming and difficult. Case in point: Macromedia Dreamweaver, a professional web development package, has a specific choice in the main drop down menu options called "Clean Up Word HTML". That is how notorious the problem is. Dreamweaver knows how to strip out many of these useless codes.

Stay away from saving your Word files as HTML. Unless your file is very lengthy, a better solution is to first copy the file over into Notepad (or any other plain text editor). Any images, graphs, and so on will not come over of course. But when you copy the text out of Notepad the content is straight text and can be pasted into any web design tool. There the formatting can be re-added using HTML design methods. This will take time depending on the length and complexity of your file, but the end result will be a file that is much more cleaner and easy to update.