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Cleaning
up Microsoft Word and Excel code
Update: Newer versions of Microsoft Office, such
as 2003, allow you to save as "Web Page, Filtered." Save your file
in this format before running "Import Word HTML."
Transforming
your Microsoft Word or Excel document to HTML format can be as
simple
as using the "Save as" function under your File menu.
The disappointment comes when you examine your source code and
find
MS-Bloat, a curious condition that can double or even quadruple
your file size. This will increase download time while making
it
more difficult for you to format your document.
Do
not despair! There are Dreamweaver treatment plans for MS-Bloat.
Microsoft
Word
There are two ways to deal with Word-Bloat. The first, presuming
you have Dreamweaver 4.0 or higher, is to simply copy your text
from Word, and paste it into Dreamweaver. Formatting is eliminated,
but your carriage returns are still intact. Carriage returns are
converted as line breaks (<BR>) instead of paragraphs (<P>).
If
you do a lot of this work and choose to convert the breaks to paragraphs,
you will want to see the breaks in your design view. To do so, you
need to have your interface set to view invisible elements (View,
Visual Aids, Invisible Elements). Additionally, check under Edit,
Preferences, Invisible Elements, to see whether "Line Breaks"
are selected. The Line Break symbol in your design view looks like
this: 
Simply
select the symbol and hit Enter to convert from <BR>
to <P>.
The
second way to convert a Word document to clean HTML is to export
the document from Word to HTML (Save as, Save as type Web Page/*.htm).
Then, from a Dreamweaver document window (sorry, it doesn't work
from the Site Files window), select File, Import, Import Word HTML.
Select your file and click "OK." Dreamweaver will tell
you what it has done to clean the code. Don't forget to save your
file. The imported file will still have some yucky MS-Bloat, but
it will be much cleaner than it was before.
Excel
As bad as Word exports to HTML, Excel is much worse. Excel produces
bloated code on a monumental scale. You will wonder how it ever
determined to insert all of those classes, styles, table cell heights
and widths, etc. Even with Dreamweaver's advanced Search & Replace
functions, it can take an hour to de-bloat your code.
There
is a faster and better way. Simply export your Excel spreadsheet
as a tab-delimited text file (File, Save As, Save as type: Text
(Tab delimited)). Then, in your Dreamweaver document window, choose
File, Import, Import Tabular Data. Browse to your file, select any
table features you want from the dialog box, and click OK. Viola!
Your table is imported cleanly into Dreamweaver. You can also use
this technique for files delimited with commas, semi-colons, and
other characters.
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Microsoft
Filter for Office 2000:
Microsoft
also has an HTML Filter that removes all the Office specific
tags. See their Info
& Download Page.
It
works OK when exporting from Word. Just open the document
you want to filter.
On the File menu, point to Export To and then click Compact
HTML. You should still use Dreamweaver's "Import Word
HTML" function on the file.
To
work on an Excel file, you'll need to export with Excel, and
then open the HTML file with the filter running independently.
Go into "Options" to eliminate CSS and Styles. It
still leaves table element width and height attributes, but
the file is much cleaner than before.
For
an even cleaner and faster option, export
Excel to a tab-delimited file (see below).
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a Web
question?
Ask
Bob
Hoffmann
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