|
|
by Sean F. Leinen and Stephen R. Clark
With all the various specialized (and sometimes cryptic) tools for creating Web pages that exist on the Internet, have you ever said to yourself, "Gee, it'd be really nice if I could just use my everyday office productivity tools, such as my word processor, to create smart-looking Web pages with a minimum of hassle"? If so, then this chapter is for you!
This chapter introduces you to five free add-on programs that plug right into the Microsoft Office and Office 95 family of productivity tools, extending those productivity tools as quick, easy-to-use, and powerful Web authoring platforms. Although the focus in this chapter is on the Internet Assistants for the Office 95 family of productivity tools, most are available for Windows 3.x and function similarly. The Office 95 family of productivity tools includes Word 7.0, Excel 7.0, PowerPoint 7.0, and Access 7.0. You'll learn how to create a Web site using the most powerful of the Internet Assistants, Word Internet Assistant, and then augment that site with specialized documents created using the Internet Assistants for the other members of the Office 95 family.
| Note |
It is anticipated that the Office 97 products will include all or most of the Web-related functionality currently available only through the various Internet Assistants. In other words, the capability to create Web pages in Word, Excel, and so on will be integrated into the applications. |
The Microsoft Word Internet Assistant is a free add-on program for users of Microsoft Word version 6.0 or higher that enables users to create documents in Word or convert existing Word documents for publishing on the World Wide Web. It also enables users to browse the Web from within Word, without having to use an external Web browser program; a special built-in Web browsing component is never more than a mouse click away.
With Word Internet Assistant, you can publish basic or very sophisticated Web pages quickly and easily. With the wide availability of Microsoft Office in corporate environments, minimal training and no additional software investment are needed to enable employees to share information on internal intranets. Entrepreneurs and small businesses can also create and maintain professional Web pages on their own without having to purchase Web creation services.
If you're already a Microsoft Word user and have had a little exposure to the Internet, chances are that you already have what you need to use Word Internet Assistant. The following are the most basic requirements to run Microsoft Word Internet Assistant for Office 95:
The last two items are not required if you want to use Word Internet Assistant for creating and reading hypertext documents over an existing local area network (for example, for corporate intranet Web pages). However, in order to use Word Internet Assistant to browse and create pages for the World Wide Web, you'll need either a direct Internet connection through your institution or business or a SLIP/PPP account obtained with a private Internet access provider.
If you already have the basic hardware and software requirements to run Microsoft Word, you probably don't need to upgrade your hardware. Word Internet Assistant is not a big program and adds very little to Word's existing hardware requirements; 2 M of free hard disk space is all that's required for the entire program.
| Word Prank Macro Scanner |
If you plan on working with Word documents to create Web pages, you should install a Microsoft scanner/cleaner for the much-publicized Word prank macros (WinWord.Concept, WinWord.Nuclear, and so on). Prank macros, as the name implies, are rogue scripts created in WordBasic (the scripting language built into every copy of Microsoft Word) whose function is to carry out whatever mischievous deed their miscreant authors intend. These prank macros attach themselves to Word documents and can easily infect another machine when a user uses Word to open an infected document. The prank macros can not only cause Word to behave strangely (WinWord.Concept, for example, blocks navigation through the directory tree in the File | Save As dialog box, and makes it impossible to save the current document as anything other than a template), but they can cause file and directory corruption and deletion, in the case of the more malicious prank macros. The latest revision of the Microsoft scanner/cleaner, at the time of this writing, is ScanProt Version 1.0. Check Microsoft's WWW home page for updates: http://www.microsoft.com./msoffice/msword/freestuff/mvtool/mvtool2.htm After you download this file, place it in an empty directory and execute it to unarchive it. Two files are unarchived: SCANPROT.DOT and README.DOC. Follow the instructions in the README.DOC file to install the program into your copy of Microsoft Word. The installation program scans your copy of Microsoft Word for any existing prank macro infection, After you download this file, place it in an empty directory and execute it to unarchive it. scans your hard disk for documents that carry any prank macros, and installs macros to After you download this file, place it in an empty directory and execute it to unarchive it. protect your copy of Microsoft Word from future infection. This process takes only a couple of minutes. |
Microsoft Word Internet Assistant is easy to install. While it is installing, it will add the appropriate menus and toolbars to Microsoft Word to enable you to begin writing HTML documents (and export existing Word documents into HTML) immediately. A copy of Microsoft Word Internet Assistant Version 2.03z is available on the included CD-ROM. Internet Assistant 2.03z is required if you are using Microsoft Word for Windows 95 and have installed Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0. For all other versions of Word, download Internet Assistant 2.0z.
After you have located the appropriate file, follow this procedure for installation:
If you ever need to reinstall the Microsoft Word Internet Assistant for any reason, just repeat the preceding procedure. After the dialog box that states that it's searching for installed components appears, you'll see the Internet Assistant for Microsoft Word Setup dialog box with two new buttons: Reinstall and Remove All. Click Reinstall if you want to reinstall Microsoft Word Internet Assistant, or click Remove All if you want to completely remove it.
You can obtain updates for Microsoft Word Internet Assistant from Microsoft's Web site or FTP site. Point your Web browser at the following URL:
http://www.microsoft.com./msword/internet/ia/
Now that you have installed Microsoft Word Internet Assistant (IA), you are ready to use it to compose a home page from scratch. The hardest, and most important, step in this process is deciding what to put on your home page. Remember the old real estate joke, "What are the three most important items in real estate? Location, location, and location." An analogous joke works here: "What are the three most important items in Web authoring? Content, content, and content." The content of your page is what attracts people and will keep them coming back.
After you decide upon content, the next most difficult task is figuring out how to present it-how your page will look and feel. The Web site should be laid out logically so that the visitor can easily see what your Web site is about. Draw a map of your proposed site to ensure the flow of your links and pages makes sense. The first page should be more or less a table of contents of your site, telling the user what can be found at the site and providing links that the user can click to easily navigate around.
The example presented in this chapter guides you through the task of creating a Web presence for an imaginary bookstore called Book Binders, a medium-sized bookstore with a good inventory of books in stock that holds weekly book signings by various authors. You'll use the various Microsoft Internet Assistants to create a home page (the first page a visitor to the site sees) for Book Binders. This home page will include links to other pages (which the user can just click to view) and will provide links to some of Book Binders' documents and brochures that have been turned into Web pages. The next section takes a look at some of the issues you need to consider when you design the Web site.
An excellent way to set up your Web site logically is to create a directory structure in order to organize and contain all the documents and images that you plan to publish on Web Site. The idea here is that after you've created all the pages, images, and links to connect them all together, "packaging up" the whole directory structure for publishing on a Web server is a simple matter. Start by creating this directory structure:
In this section, you're going to see just how easy it is to create Web pages with Microsoft Word IA. Start up Microsoft Word, select File | New, select HTML.DOT from the General tab, and click OK (see Figure 10.2). This template came from the Word Internet Assistant installation program, which added it to the list of templates your copy of Word already had. This template adds a few new options (discussed as they come up in the example) to your toolbar when you select it and hides those Word toolbar options that are not applicable to HTML documents.
Now you're at the beginning of a new document, ready to begin typing your Web page. Notice that the Formatting toolbar (the second toolbar down from the menu bar) no longer sports the Font and Size drop-down selection lists. These toolbar options are not applicable to Web authoring because the visiting person's browser program (the client Web browsing software) determines what font and size to use. As a Web author, you're concerned only with the structure of the document, which makes your job easier. You're probably wondering, "OK, but how does the client Web browsing program know to display some text larger than the rest, and know when to bold, italicize, and so on?" This information is part of the structure of the HTML document; an HTML document is divided into different parts by tags.
Figure 10.3 shows some of the tags that are available from the Styles drop-down list in the Formatting toolbar. This figure shows the six standard heading levels for HTML documents; H1 displays the largest text available, and H6 displays the smallest text available. Again, keep in mind that size is relative-the client Web browsing program determines precisely what font and size to use for displaying the various heading levels.
The first step is to add a title to the top of the home page. (The title is usually the name of the company or institution.) From the Style drop-down list in the Formatting toolbar, choose the largest heading, Heading 1 or H1, click the Center Text icon (indicated in Figure 10.3), and type in the title Book Binders. While you're at it, add a subtitle to let people know what Book Binders is all about. Choose Heading 2 (H2), click the Center Text icon, and type in the subtitle A Bookstore For The Masses.
Before you get any farther, name the document default.htm by saving it to disk in the c:\Website directory you created. In the Save As dialog box, make sure the Save as type: drop-down list at the bottom displays HTML Document (*.htm), and then type default.htm in the File name: field (see Figure 10.4). After you've saved the document for the first time as the proper type and with the name of default.htm, you can use File | Save, and Word will save the document properly from here on out.
| Caution |
Do not be tempted to merely type in the file name with an .htm extension, thinking that Word Internet Assistant will automatically save the document as the correct type. If you initially save the document and do not change the Save as type: field to HTML Document (*.htm), Word will save the document as a normal Word document by default. The next time you work on the document, it will still look like a valid HTML document because the same toolbars, editing screen, and HTML template will display as they did before, but the document will not function as an HTML document. |
It's time to add some descriptive information to the page. Keep this information short and sweet because the home page is basically just a table of contents for the whole Web site. Select the Normal,P paragraph style from the Style drop-down menu in the Formatting toolbar, and type in the company description shown in Figure 10.5. This new home page is starting to take shape! Of course, just as you can with any good word processor, you can copy and paste text from any document into your HTML document and then edit that text's properties to fit HTML standards.
| Note |
You can type paragraphs one right after the other using the default paragraph style (Normal,P). When you press the Enter key at the end of each paragraph, a new paragraph is started automatically. |
So far, the home page looks more like a normal document than a table of contents. One way to spruce it up a bit is to provide a list. There are two types of lists in HTML: numbered lists and bulleted lists. You can easily insert them into the document by using Word IA's Numbered List and Bulleted List icons (see Figure 10.6). The numbered list tends to denote a certain order or sequence to the items, so a bulleted list is more appropriate for this example. Visitors to the Book Binders home page might not be interested in the order of the items that they see on the page, and more than likely want to go straight to the information they need.
A bulleted list would work well just below the short introductory paragraph. From the Style drop-down list in the Formatting toolbar, select List Bullet,UL (or click the Bulleted List icon). Type in the bulleted list items you see in Figure 10.6. (Word Internet Assistant automatically provides the bullets for you in a bulleted list when you press Enter; it also automatically provides the numbers for numbered lists.)
| Note |
The UL next to List Bullet in the Style drop-down list stands for Unordered List-the standard HTML tag for specifying a bulleted list. Likewise, the OL next to List Number means Ordered List-the standard HTML tag for specifying a numbered list. |
| Tip |
Besides being able to create a bulleted or numbered list by selecting one or the other from the Style drop-down list before typing the text, you can also highlight existing paragraph text and make a bulleted or numbered list out of it by selecting the List Bullet or List Number style as appropriate. After you highlight the text and select the list type from the Style drop-down menu, just position the flashing cursor in this text and press the Enter key where you want each new bullet (or number) to appear. |
If you've surfed the Net before, you've probably noticed the heavy use of something called rules, or horizontal bars, in Web pages. The reasons for their frequent use are simple: they make a page look sharper and they add a kind of delineation or page separation in long documents. Many variations of rules exist; some of the fancier ones include solid bars of color, bars of rainbow hues, and those yellow-and-black diagonally striped bars that you recognize from construction sites. This example uses a basic rule as a separator.
The first thing to ask yourself when you are deciding where to put rules in your HTML document is where you want the appearance of separation in your document. In the Book Binders home page, a rule between the subtitle and the body text seems natural. To place one there, position your flashing cursor at the end of the subtitle and press Enter. To create the horizontal rule, select Horizontal Rule,HR from the Style drop-down list, or click the Horizontal Rule button (fifth button from the far right side of the Formatting toolbar). A horizontal rule appears right on the new line that occurred when you pressed Enter.
Another good place for a horizontal rule would be right after the bulleted list, because you're going to be inserting some more material there. Position the flashing cursor at the end of the last item in the bulleted list. Press Enter to drop the cursor to the next line, press the Backspace key twice to get out of bulleted list mode, and then click the Horizontal Rule button on the toolbar.
So far, the home page you are creating doesn't seem all that special. However, you're about to get into the meat of what HTML is about: hyperlinks. The key to hyperlinks are things called anchors, or highlighted text (usually blue in color). When a user clicks an anchor, it jumps the user to the destination to which it's linked. The Book Binders home page has three items in its bulleted list that inform the user what to click to navigate around the Web site, and you need to create those hyperlinks. First, however, you must create the linked documents, because part of the hyperlink process is selecting the file to which a particular anchor jumps.
Select File | Save to save the latest changes to your default.htm home page, but do not close default.htm. Begin a new HTML document as you did before, selecting File | New and selecting HTML.DOT from the General tab. For the purposes of brevity (and quick illustration), select Heading 1,H1 from the Style drop-down list, and type in Book Binders Information Center. Save this document as an HTML document, with the name c:\Website\pages\infocntr.htm.
Switch your Word view back to default.htm. To create a hyperlink between the words Book Binders Information Center in the first item of the bulleted list and the document c:\Website\pages\infocntr.htm, follow these steps:
| Note |
Hyperlinks can contain two types of file paths: relative and absolute. A relative path is relative to the current HTML document's location on the Web server. For example, say that the currently displayed HTML document is default.htm, and there exists a pages subdirectory in which default.htm is located; a hyperlink using a relative path to the infocntr.htm document in the pages subdirectory would use the path pages/infocntr.htm (notice the lack of a leading slash). An absolute path includes a full path to the document to which it's anchored, regardless of where in the server's directory tree the currently displayed HTML document is located. These absolute paths usually have a leading slash (for example, /pages/infocntr.htm). It is highly recommended that you use relative paths in your hyperlinks wherever possible, because when you copy your Web site's directory structure to the Web server, the links will remain accurate no matter where in the Web server's directory tree your home page's directory structure is located. To see how absolute paths are created, click the Link Path button on the Hyperlink dialog box to see the Use fixed file location option. Enabling this option will cause all hyperlinks from that point out to use absolute paths. The Book Binders example used in this chapter uses relative paths for all hyperlinks, so make sure that Use fixed file location is not enabled. You should leave this option disabled unless you have specific reasons to use absolute paths. |
Figure 10.8 : The resulting hyperlink.
Inside Microsoft Word, hyperlinks work just as they do on a Web site, with an exception; a single mouse click on the anchor merely highlights it (for use in editing the properties of that anchor), whereas a double mouse click navigates you to the document to which it's linked. This is most likely the opposite of what you're used to with a standard Web browser; single-clicks in a Web browser navigate, and double-clicks highlight. The reason Microsoft Word with Internet Assistant works this way is because you're editing a document; because the phrase Book Binders Information Center is now considered a single object in the document (an anchor in this case), it's standard fare in authoring tools to use a single mouse click to select that object for editing purposes. Try this out. Single-clicking Book Binders Information Center should highlight the whole phrase, giving you the opportunity to edit the link properties with the Hyperlink icon on the Formatting toolbar; a double-click should navigate you to the c:\Website\pages\infocntr.htm file you created earlier.
| Note |
Word Internet Assistant's Web Browse view enables you to test-drive your page thus far. In Browse view, mouse clicks work the way you'd expect them to in a browser program: single-clicks navigate you to the document that the anchor is linked to, and double-clicks highlight the anchor. To try this out, notice the very first icon over on the far left of the Formatting toolbar (the one that looks like a pair of eyeglasses). That's the Switch to Web Browse View icon, and as its name implies, it switches from Edit mode to Browse mode. With the default.htm file as the active document, click the Switch to Web Browse View icon and watch what happens. Now, instead of the I-beam mouse cursor you see in Edit mode, there's a normal arrow cursor like you'd see in a Web browser program. Single-click Book Binders Information Center in your Web page, and notice how it immediately navigates you to the linked document behind it-no double-clicking necessary. |
Word Internet Assistant even enables you to create hyperlinks to documents that do not exist yet. In the second item of your bulleted list, highlight the two words Book Catalog at the end of the sentence. Click the Hyperlink icon on the Formatting toolbar, and use the Browse button to navigate to the c:\Website\pages directory. In the File Name field of the Select File to Link dialog box, type in bkcatlog.htm (you'll create this file later) and click OK. Click OK in the Hyperlink dialog box to complete the link. Notice that you have created an anchor out of Book Catalog, which, when double-clicked, displays the error dialog box shown in Figure 10.9. You'll fix this error later when you use Excel Internet Assistant to create the bkcatlog.htm file. For now, just dismiss this error dialog box by clicking OK.
Hyperlinks are not limited to just documents resident on your local machine; you can create hyperlinks to other Web sites, or even to specific documents located several layers deep on other Web sites. Word Internet Assistant makes this easy; all you have to know is the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) path name to that Web site or remote document.
Try this feature by adding a new item to your bulleted list that will jump the user to the Library Of Congress search engine. Position your cursor at the end of the third bullet item and press Enter to create a fourth bullet. Type the text you see in Figure 10.10 and create an anchor out of the words Library Of Congress search engine. Instead of using the Browse button to look for a local document, type in the following for the File or URL field of the Hyperlink dialog box: http://lcWeb.loc.gov./harvest/.
Click OK in the Hyperlink dialog box. If you're anxious to see what this anchor is going to do, start up your Internet connection (if it's via a dial-up modem connection), click the Switch to Web Browse View icon (the little eyeglasses), and single-click the Library Of Congress search engine anchor. Word IA attempts to contact the remote site, as shown in Figure 10.11. After contacting the site, Word IA downloads the appropriate HTML documents to display the Library Of Congress search engine (see Figure 10.12). You can use this search engine to search for online publications such as public domain newsletters, reports, and so on.
| Note |
Notice that you're still in Word, which opens up a new window to display this site. This window works just like any Web browser; this is not a static Word document at all. You can click the hyperlinks presented, fill in the text entry fields, and click any buttons presented from the remote site. If you didn't know you were in Word, you'd probably swear you were using a Web browser. You know what? You are! In the beginning of this chapter, I mention "a Web browsing component that is never more than a mouse click away." That Web browsing component is InternetWorks, a product developed by a company called BookLink Technologies, Inc. and owned by America Online. Just before InternetWorks was sold to America Online, Microsoft licensed enough of its code to create the Web browsing component of Word Internet Assistant. |
To form good Web authoring habits from the beginning (as well as to be kind to potential Web site visitors), you should title and sign your Web page. Titling a page is not the same as putting title text at the top of the page; instead, it's giving your page the name by which it is known on the Web. Web indexing/search engines use this information to find your site. This information is not always visible on the page itself; if it displays anywhere, it'll more than likely show up on the Web browser program's title bar. The title information is some of the hidden code that Word Internet Assistant inserts at the top of your HTML document.
Word Internet Assistant provides two ways to title a Web page: you can click on the Title icon on the toolbar (the last icon on the far right of the Formatting toolbar-it looks like a sheet of paper with a lowercase i in it), or you can select File | HTML Document Info. Either way, the HTML Document Head Information dialog box appears. Click the Title button on the Formatting toolbar, and type in Book Binders Bookstore, as shown in Figure 10.13. This title is descriptive enough that Web search/indexing engines will be able to help a person looking for book resources to find this page. Click OK.
Figure 10.13: Titling the home page.
Signing a Web page means placing information on it (usually at the bottom) that enables visitors to contact the people behind the Web site and putting a date on the page. You can sign a page neatly by using the Address style on the Formatting toolbar. The Address style is the Web convention of displaying the address information in a special way. Browsers such as Internet Explorer, Netscape, and Mosaic might show this information in italicized text; other browsers might show the address information indented or right-justified. Either way, the address information will be set off in a way that makes it clearly different from the rest of the document.
From the Formatting toolbar, select Address from the Style drop-down menu, and then enter information something like that shown in Figure 10.14. Also notice that the e-mail path is anchored so that visitors can merely click the e-mail path to send you e-mail. To set up this procedure, highlight the e-mail path, click the Hyperlink button on the Formatting toolbar, and in the File or URL field of the Hyperlink dialog box, type in the e-mail path again, only this time prefaced with mailto:. This special HTML tag tells the local browser software to spawn the local e-mail program with the specified e-mail path as the recipient; all the viewer has to do is type the e-mail message body. Although the Web browsing component of Word Internet Assistant doesn't recognize this tag, most stand-alone Web browsers do, and I've included it here because most of the Web pages you see out on the Internet are set up much the same way.
You're probably wondering all along what all this Internet Assistant GUI stuff has been doing behind the scenes. With the default.htm file as the active window, select View | HTML Source. Believe it or not, you wrote all that HTML code! As shown in Figure 10.15, there should be a two-button toolbar kind of floating around the top of this HTML Source window; the left button returns you to Edit mode, and the right button formats and color codes the HTML. Click the left button to return to Edit mode.
One of the main attractions to the Web is its capability to incorporate pictures into documents, as evidenced by the abundance of Web pages with pictures and graphics. Word Internet Assistant makes the process of incorporating pictures and graphics into the HTML document easy; just place your I-beam cursor where you want the picture to appear, and click the Picture icon on the Formatting toolbar (the fourth button from the far right). In the dialog box that appears, specify the path name of the picture (there's a Browse button that'll help you do this) and click OK.
One thing that Word Internet Assistant does not have in its arsenal, however, is an image editing capability. You'll need a separate graphics package to do that, preferably one that can work with both gif (Graphics Interchange Format) and JPEG (Joint Photography Exchange Group) images. Sorry, the built-in Windows 95/Windows NT PaintBrush just won't do. You can create and edit gif and JPEG files in the PowerPoint Internet Assistant, which is covered later in this chapter.
Microsoft includes an excellent online tutorial for using Word Internet Assistant. The tutorial directs you to other Web sites where you can learn more about and download software for creating graphics, doing image mapping, and more. It also points you to sites that were created using Word IA. The tutorial is located at the following URL:
http://www.microsoft.com/msword/internet/ia/step.htm
Microsoft Excel Internet Assistant is an add-in wizard that enables users to create and distribute Microsoft Excel documents online for viewing with any popular browser. It helps Excel users convert their spreadsheet data to HTML format, either as a separate document or as part of an existing document.
The hardware and software requirements for Excel Internet Assistant are basically the same as for the Internet Assistants for the other members of the Office 95 family; in the case of the Excel application itself, you need version 7.0 or higher.
One highly recommended software item is a minor patch to Excel to correct three known bugs. This free patch corrects the following known problems: the 15-digit number bug, the Link to same cell on different sheets bug, and the Transposing ranges bug. To get a copy of the patch, as well as a more in-depth description of the three known bugs, point your Web browser to the following URL:
http://www.microsoft.com./kb/softlib/mslfiles/XL15LINK.EXE
After you download the file, place the XL15LINK.EXE file in a separate empty directory and execute it to unarchive it. Follow the instructions in the resulting README.TXT file for further installation information.
After you've applied the patch to your copy of Excel, you're ready to install the Excel Internet Assistant. You can find the Excel Internet Assistant on the CD-ROM, but you can get updates by pointing your Web browser at the following URL:
http://www.microsoft.com/msexcel/internet/ia/
Installing Excel Internet Assistant is a little bit different than installing Word Internet Assistant; instead of running an executable file to start the installation process as you would with Word Internet Assistant, you merely drop the file HTML.XLA into the LIBRARY subdirectory of your Excel product directory. Just follow this easy procedure to install and enable the Excel Internet Assistant:
Excel Internet Assistant is one of the very best tools to use if you have to create tables for Web pages. If you have a spreadsheet with a certain look and feel, you can maintain this look and feel as you export it to an HTML table. If your spreadsheet includes various colors, different fonts, text formatting, and so on, Excel IA can create a Web page table from this spreadsheet with all these things. Use the following basic procedure to create a Web page table from any spreadsheet:
To illustrate this process, the next paragraphs explain how to create a simple Excel spreadsheet that shows an excerpt from an online book catalog and import that into the Web page as a table. Start Excel and type in a small spreadsheet like the one shown in Figure 10.17. Don't be afraid to spiff up the looks of this simple spreadsheet; use bold text for the column headers, add some color text in certain places, and so on.
Figure 10.17: Creating a simple spreadsheet and preparing to export it with Excel IA.
Next, highlight the whole block of rows/columns where you typed text (including any column headers). An easy way to do this is to position your mouse at the top left cell where you typed something, press and hold your primary mouse button, and drag diagonally until you end up at the bottom right cell. Release the primary mouse button. Select Tools | Internet Assistant Wizard. The first dialog box asks what cells you want to convert to an HTML table; by default, the location range of the cells you highlighted already appears there. Click Next.
The second dialog box asks where you want the resulting table to appear, either in a new HTML document (which you'll get to select a file name for in a subsequent step) or in an existing HTML document. Have Excel IA create a new document; you can use this as an opportunity to fix the link you made from the anchor Book Catalog (in the second item of the bulleted list) to a previously nonexistent document c:\Website\pages\bkcatlog.htm. Use the Browse button to navigate to it, and click Next.
The third dialog box asks for more specific information that would be relative to a stand-alone HTML document-things like Title, Heading, Footer information, and so on. Fill these fields in, using Figure 10.18 as your guide, and click Finish. Remember, the Title information is the information that appears in the title bar of the visiting person's Web browser, whereas the Header information appears as part of the HTML document at the very top. If you've done this successfully, clicking the Book Catalog anchor in default.htm (while in Web Browse mode) should navigate you to the nicely formatted table shown in Figure 10.19.
Figure 10.18: Filling in the information for a stand-alone HTML document.
Figure 10.19: Congratulations! A very nicely formatted HTML table from a simple Excel spreadsheet.
| Note |
If you do not see a cleanly formatted table while in Word Internet Assistant, but rather one with what seems to be HTML comments between the Header and the table (which might be blue in color), you are still in Edit mode. Click the little eyeglasses icon on the far left of the Formatting toolbar to switch to the Web Browse mode, and you should see the document properly. |
The Microsoft PowerPoint Internet Assistant enables users of PowerPoint for Windows 95 to create professional-looking Web pages merely by creating a PowerPoint presentation and then saving it as HTML. Because most Web sites consist of multiple pages that are linked together using hyperlinks, PowerPoint lends itself well as a Web authoring tool. A typical workflow would be to create the PowerPoint presentation first, and then convert it to HTML.
The minimum version of PowerPoint needed is version 7.0. The hardware and other software requirements are pretty much the same as the other Internet Assistants, so this section focuses on a free patch you might need, depending on your version of PowerPoint. Check your version of PowerPoint 95 by selecting Help | About Microsoft PowerPoint. The second line down from the top should report the version number. If you have version 7.0a, you need the patch. If your version number is merely 7.0 (without the a), you do not need the patch.
PowerPoint version 7.0a has a bug in it that causes it to exhibit a screen redraw problem in certain views after several minutes of use. This bug exists only in the a release of PowerPoint 95. It makes PowerPoint drain system resources, causing screen redraws to distort and system performance to degrade upon continued use. When the bug manifests itself, you might receive system alerts notifying you of low system resources. If you do receive these alerts, immediately save your work and exit PowerPoint. Your files will be OK, right up to, and including, the last changes you made to them. If, on the other hand, you do not save and exit PowerPoint as soon as you notice the symptoms, you are susceptible to losing any recent changes to the open PowerPoint files. After you exit PowerPoint, system resources (and the responsiveness of other running applications) will return to normal. The problem occurs only under Windows 95, although it can occur under Windows NT 3.51 with heavy PowerPoint use.
To get the patch for this bug, point your Web browser to the following URL:
http://www.microsoft.com./kb/softlib/mslfiles/PPREDRAW.EXE
Place this file in an empty directory, and execute it to unarchive it. Next, follow the instructions in the resulting README.TXT file to apply the patch.
PowerPoint Internet Assistant is included on the CD-ROM, but updates can be had by pointing your Web browser to
http://www.microsoft.com./mspowerpoint/internet/ia/
Place the PPTIA.EXE file in its own empty directory, and execute it to unarchive it. This step should result in four new files: IA4PPT95.EXE, IA4PPT95.htm, IA4PPT95.DOC, and README.TXT. The IA4PPT95.EXE file is the setup program, and README.TXT is nothing more than a packing list file (something like a MANIFEST.TXT). The real documentation is in the IA4PPT95.DOC and IA4PPT95.htm files. These files are essentially the same document but in different formats: Word and HTML, respectively. Use whichever of the two formats is more convenient for you. When you double-click either file in Explorer, it should spawn the appropriate application to read it: Word, in the case of IA4PPT95.DOC, or your Web browser, in the case of IA4PPT95.htm.
To install PowerPoint Internet Assistant, first check to see whether PowerPoint is already running; if it is, close it. Next, double-click the IA4PPT95.EXE file in Explorer. From here, you can pretty much follow the instructions on the screen. User intervention is required only twice, and in both cases, a click of the OK button continues the installation. After the installation completes, start PowerPoint. You should notice a new item added to the File menu: Export as HTML (see Figure 10.20).
| Note |
If you use a network installation of PowerPoint (that is, you run PowerPoint from a network-mounted drive on a server), running the preceding installation procedure will not work. You'll need to contact your site system administrator to have him or her install PowerPoint Internet Assistant into that server's PowerPoint installation. |
In both the IA4PPT95.DOC and IA4PPT95.htm files, there is a basic procedure that you can use to create HTML documents from a PowerPoint presentation. It's located in the section Step by Step with the Internet Assistant for PowerPoint. Rather than repeating those steps, this section focuses on using the PowerPoint Internet Assistant to create an information center for the Book Binders company Web page. Remember the short infocntr.htm file you created with Word Internet Assistant to illustrate Word IA's ease of creating hyperlinks to other local documents (the one where you only typed in Book Binders Information Center at the top of the document)? This section shows you how to flesh out that file with a PowerPoint presentation.
Start PowerPoint and create a very short PowerPoint presentation on Book Binders. Feel free to use PowerPoint's AutoContent Wizard or one of your own templates. In Figure 10.20, I used AutoContent Wizard, answering it with the following options:
First dialog box
Second dialog box
Third dialog box
Fourth dialog box
Fifth (and final) dialog box
You should now have an eight-slide presentation with boilerplate text that you can replace with any text you want. To save time (and because this is only a sample Web site anyway), go right to exporting this eight-slide presentation as is to HTML. Select File | Export as HTML as shown in Figure 10.20. You should then see the HTML Export Options dialog box, which enables you to choose the output style, output format (gif or JPEG), JPEG image quality and file size, and the folder where the resulting HTML files will go.
| Caution |
When PowerPoint Internet Assistant exports a presentation as HTML, it creates not only HTML files, but gif/JPEG images as well. PowerPoint Internet Assistant exports both the HTML files and the gif/JPEG images to one directory-the directory you specify in the Folder for HTML Export in the HTML Export Options dialog box. You should export every PowerPoint presentation you plan to use in your Web site to its own subdirectory of your Web site tree; otherwise, you will end up with an incredible mess of HTML files and gif/JPEG images in what you might have thought was an HTML-only directory. |
In Figure 10.21, notice that the sample PowerPoint presentation is being exported to c:\Website\pages\infocntr. Even though this directory doesn't exist yet, PowerPoint Internet Assistant will create it. The reason we're not just exporting to the c:\Website\pages directory is not only to avoid a mixture (a mess) of gif/JPEG images and HTML files in this directory, but to have all the HTML and images for the presentation located in one place, their own subdirectory, in case they ever need to be removed, edited, or replaced.
Figure 10.21: Selecting the directory to which to export the presentation.
To make a change, it's a simple matter to remove the files in the Web presentation's subdirectory, make the necessary changes to the parent PowerPoint presentation, and then re-export the parent PowerPoint presentation as HTML to that subdirectory. If the Web presentation were exported to, say, c:\Website\pages, you'd have a mess to clean up in there, for you'd have to remove all the Web presentation-related files without disturbing the other HTML files already there.
After you have typed in the path c:\Website\pages\infocntr for the folder to export to (or you can use the Browse button as shown in Figure 10.21), click OK, and immediately slide your mouse all the way to the bottom of the screen, out of the PowerPoint window. The export process will begin.
| Caution |
During the export process, you will see various dialog boxes and windows appearing and disappearing on your screen (as in Figure 10.22). The Scroll Lock indicator on your keyboard may also flash on and off. Do not move your mouse anywhere near the PowerPoint window during this time, or you might get stray graphics in the resulting Web presentation. |
After the export is completed, you'll see a Status dialog box informing you that the export completed successfully. You can move your mouse now. Click OK in this dialog box, save your PowerPoint presentation to a safe place (you might want to consider the c:\Website\pages directory itself for later edits/updates), and exit PowerPoint.
What happened here is that all the PowerPoint slides themselves were exported to graphics files of the type you chose on the HTML Export Options dialog (sldXXX.gif or sldXXX.jpg). Along with those graphics files, the following were created:
Both the images and the HTML text files went to the c:\Website\pages\infocntr directory, which itself was created by the export process. The HTML files are set up so that one links to the next, just like a PowerPoint presentation, but with a twist: an index.htm file was also created that acts as a master menu of them all. It is this index.htm file that you want to link to the Book Binders Information Center anchor on the main page. To view the index.htm file, just double-click it in Explorer, and you should see something like what's shown in Figure 10.23.
Notice a cool feature of the PowerPoint Internet Assistant: it names each anchor on the index.htm according to the text found at the top of each slide; that is, the title text at the top of each slide is now an anchor on the index.htm-just click it to go to that document. Imagine the possibilities; if you had to create a bunch of small Web documents with a master menu from which the user could pick, you could simply create a PowerPoint presentation with descriptive document titles at the top of each slide (each slide being a stand-alone document). Export that presentation as HTML, and voilà! An entire technical data center, or card catalog, or recipe list, or-you get the idea.
You might notice that the product registration information you entered when initially installing PowerPoint made its way into this file and appears at the top. If that's the case in your index.htm file, it's easily fixed. Just open that file inside of Word (with Word IA installed, of course), edit out the registration information, and save it as an HTML file.
To create a link from the Book Binders Information Center anchor to this index.htm file, start Word and open up the c:\Website\default.htm file. Single-click the Book Binders Information Center anchor to highlight it, and click the Hyperlink icon on the Formatting toolbar (the icon that looks like three links of chain). Using the Browse button on the Hyperlink dialog box, navigate down to the c:\Website\pages\infocntr directory and select the index.htm file (see Figure 10.24). Click Open in the Select File To Link dialog box, and then click OK in the Hyperlink dialog box. This procedure orphans the original file c:\Website\ pages\infocntr.htm that you used as a placeholder for the Book Binders Information Center anchor, so you can now just delete the infocntr.htm file altogether.
| Tip |
The first section of this chapter mentions that Word IA lacks a native graphics editor capable of dealing with gif/JPEG files. Remember how I hinted that PowerPoint Internet Assistant can? Just use PowerPoint to create a one-slide presentation, export it as HTML to a temporary directory (say, c:\temp), and grab the sld001.gif or sld001.jpg file (as appropriate) that the export process creates. You might be interested in the little button images that the export process creates as well; these are useful to place at the bottom of your pages so the users can navigate back and forth. Without their .gif/.jpg file extensions, these little button images are called p2hnext (an arrow pointing to the right), p2hprev (an arrow pointing to the left), and p2hup (a double arrow pointing to the left). You might also want to take a peek at the other p2h files to see whether you can use them. The remainder of the files from the one-slide presentation export process can be deleted. |
Now to create a logo for the Book Binders home page. In PowerPoint, pick a template/slide style that you like, and type the introductory company text and subtitle on it. Delete any extraneous empty slides that might also be in that presentation set-you want only one slide. (This saves on the time required for the export and avoids creating extr+a files for slides you don't need.) Export that single-slide presentation to a temporary directory. Copy the sld001.gif (or sld001.jpg) file to your c:\Website\images directory as logo.gif (or logo.jpg). Next, open the default.htm file in Word and insert the picture where you want it to appear by using the Picture icon on the Formatting toolbar (see Figure 10.25). You might want to use this logo to replace the name and subtitle, so after inserting the picture, just delete the text for the name and subtitle (see Figure 10.26).]
| Tip |
Notice the use of the Alternative Text field on the Picture dialog box to display text for text-only Web browsers. |
This chapter covered a lot of ground. You've learned how to use the Word, Excel, and PowerPoint Internet Assistants as integrated tools to create a sample Web site. The majority of the sample site was created with Word Internet Assistant for general layout and look and feel; you then filled in the site using the other Internet Assistants. If you've used relative path names for all the hyperlinks in your HTML documents, copying the entire c:\Website directory structure to the Web server for publishing is now easy. With relative paths, you can transfer Web site directory structures without having to worry about "breaking" the hyperlinks.
Note that from within the Word Internet Assistant you can use the icons on the toolbar to insert things like spreadsheets and presentations. Another tool you have in your arsenal is to use normal Windows drag-and-drop functionality to insert these objects into your HTML document, and Word IA will then take care of the translation to HTML. One of the more detailed things you didn't learn but you might want to use is Word IA's capability to create fill-in forms. This feature is accessible within Word IA by selecting Insert | Form Field.
The two other Internet Assistants are the Schedule+ Internet Assistant and the Access Internet Assistant. The Access Internet Assistant works only with the Windows 95 version of Access and requires database knowledge of tables, queries, form datasheets, and reports, all of which are beyond the scope of this chapter. The Schedule+ Internet Assistant also is available only for the Windows 95 version and was in a beta version at the time of this writing. Although individual users may not find many uses for these two tools, those using intranets may find them invaluable. For example, project team members could post their calendars for viewing by others by using the Schedule+ Internet Assistant. You can obtain Schedule+ Internet Assistant at the following URL:
http://www.microsoft.com./msscheduleplus/internet/ia/
To get Access Internet Assistant, go to this URL:
http://www.microsoft.com./msaccess/internet/ia/
You should now have a good idea of how to use the various Internet Assistants for Office products to create logically laid out and aesthetically pleasing Web pages.
