Ms Office Tune Up

Ever since Microsoft’s belated 1995 realization that the Internet was something big that ought to factor into the company’s plans, it has crammed the Office suite with Net-friendly features and added Office-friendly features to Internet Explorer. The goal has always been to blur the previously hard-edged distinction between here-your computer and your LAN-and there-the Web, FTP sites, and other online locations.

What do you do if you have existing documents, worksheets, and presentations that you want to mount on the Web? Internet Explorer can work in conjunction with Office to dis­play these files, but all your readers might not have that capability. To make sure anyone who surfs to your site can access your data, you need to convert your files into the Web’s lingua franca: HTML. Fortunately, Office applications make this easy by including features that convert documents from their native format into HTML.

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Before you save your presentation as a Web page, you might want to tell PowerPoint which browser or browsers your users surf with because this determines the features PowerPoint uses to render the Web page XML or HTML. For example, if you tell PowerPoint that your users browse with Netscape Navigator 4.0 or later, PowerPoint disables the MHTML format (described in the steps that follow). Choose Office, PowerPoint Options, click Advanced, click Web Options, and then display the Browsers tab. Use the People Who View This Web Page Will Be Using list to click your target browser. Note, too, that you can use the check boxes in the Options list to customize the Web page features.

Publishing a PowerPoint presentation to the Web is becoming increasingly common. After a conference, for example, many people make their presentations available online for those who did not attend. Also with business travel budgets tightening, “presenting” online saves the expense of either traveling to the audience or bringing the audience to you.

PowerPoint gives you extensive page-publishing options, as the following steps show:

1. Open the presentation you want to publish.
2. Choose Office, Save As (avoid the arrow) to open the Save As dialog box.
3. Select a location for the new file.
4. In the Save As Type list, you choose from two possibilities:
   • Single File Web Page-This is the MIME Encapsulation of Aggregate HTML Documents (MHTML) format. It combines the HTML and references to exter­nal files such as images into a single file that uses the .mht extension. Note that only Internet Explorer supports this file type.
   • Web Page-This is a regular HTML Web page that uses the .htm file exten­sion. PowerPoint also creates a folder named Filename_files (where Filename is the text in the File Name text box) that includes any external files such as images required by the Web page.

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To save the supporting files in the same folder as the Web page, choose Office, PowerPoint Options, click Advanced, click Web Options, display the Files tab, and deactivate the Organize Supporting Files in a Folder check box.

5. Use the File Name text box to change the name of the file, if necessary. If you don’t, PowerPoint changes the document’s extension to .mht or .htm (depending on the file type you chose in step 4).
6. Click Publish to display the Publish as Web Page dialog box, as shown in Figure 1.


Figure 1 Use the Publish as Web Page dialog box to con­figure your presenta­tion’s Web page options.

7. To determine how much of the presentation you publish, PowerPoint gives you three options:
   • Complete Presentation-Activate this option to publish every slide in the pre­sentation.
   • Slide Number X Through Y-Activate this option to publish only the range of slides you specify using the two spin boxes.
   • Custom Show-Activate this option to publish the custom slide show you select in the associated list. (PowerPoint disables this option if the presentation has no custom slide shows.)
8. If you also want to include your speaker notes, leave the Display Speaker Notes check box activated.
9. Use the options in the Browser Support group to set the target browser for your users.
10. To change the page title (the text that displays in the browser’s title bar), click Change, enter the new title, and click OK.
11. Click Publish. PowerPoint publishes the presentation to a Web page.

PowerPoint sets up the presentation Web page with an ActiveX control that displays the slide show content. By default, Internet Explorer doesn’t display ActiveX controls for secu­rity reasons (and browsers such as Firefox don’t display them at all). Therefore, when you launch the presentation Web page, Internet Explorer displays the Information Bar, which tells you that the program prevents an ActiveX control from running. Click the Information Bar, click Allow Blocked Content, and then click Yes when Outlook Express asks if you are sure. Figure 2 shows a published presentation.

Figure 2 A PowerPoint presenta­tion published as a Web page.

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