Microsoft Word has many features to help you maintain a web site. In fact, it is possible to create an entire site using this product if you want!
Let’s assume you have created the following document.
Now you can do a number of “web-like” things. One task that you can easily perform is to add hyperlinks. This is simply done by selecting the “hyperlink” option from the “Insert” menu.
If you are creating the document for an Intranet, you can simply view it directly from Internet Explorer! You can hyperlink to the document from your web pages without any effort at all. Simply include the document and it’s “.doc” file type. For example,
<A HREF="ecology.doc">Ecology</a>
While you can also do this from the web, it is not a good idea as not everyone has loaded Microsoft Office onto their computer systems.
It is better to output the Word document as an HTML page. You can do this by selecting “Save as Web Page..” from the file menu.
To see an example of this, view our “ecology” article.
You should be aware, however, that Word is designed to ensure that the document can actually be read back in from it’s HTML form and returned to it’s original Word format. Thus, a large number of comments and other strange tags are included in the HTML document which are not required to format the document. Thus, your Word HTML format documents will be substantially larger than versions that you had created manually.
