MS Office Docs Converted to Web Pages

Problems displaying in various browsers

[Fortune Hunter]

I have a client that sends me a technical schedule in Microsoft Excel every month to post on his site. The schedule is very large and displayed on 3 different sheets within the workbook. I open it up and just re-save it as web page and dump the file in a directory that users can access with a drop down menu for the appropriate month.

As you might expect it shows up perfectly in Internet explorer, but either doesn't show up at all or totally garbled up in other browsers. I have tried letting Dreamweaver go through and clean up the garbage code in there with its clean up feature for Word, but that doesn't work at all and only makes it not display for IE either.

My hunch is that saving a MS Office doc (especially one with multiple sheets) as a web page that it creates special Active X and other code that is not recognized by other browsers and therefore doesn't display properly and probably never will.

However if anyone has ever done this and worked around the limitation I would love to hear how. It just isn't practical to try and re-create this spreadsheet into a clean HTML page every month both because of the size and time it would take. However I really want to get this to show up in at least Fire Fox and Netscape at a minimum as well as IE.

Any suggestions?

FH

[bill]

I run several Excel spreadsheet reports on an Intranet just the way you do. I take the Excel files and so a Save as webpage and then drop all the created files and folders into a directory on the webserver. Admittedly the HTML generated isn't anything to be proud of, but it works. I've tested my pages in IE 6 & 7, Firefox and Opera. All workbooks show up properly and are completely navigable in all browsers. I've been running these particular reports like this for about 10 years. I haven't had browser problems since the Netscape days...yet even then the data was still visible.

I guess you could look at the Excel reports and simplify the design. Don't bother trying to fix the HTML. It's not worth the effort. If you want to adhere to strict coding practices for these pages then I suggest you make a CMS for the data to be input into. Then you can control the HTML completely.

Microsoft Office HTML is not pretty, but in most cases (like this) it is at least functional.

[Marcia]

I tried Office 2K and didn't like the HTML it put out at all. I hate to admit it, but I never updated from Office 97 because the conversion to HTML is just fine in 97 for what I was using it for at the time - and still might for a site.

Are later versions any better than Office 2000?

[Fortune Hunter]

Bill:

If you have been doing exactly the same thing and it does show up for you. Do you have any other suggestions of things I could check that might be creating the problem I am having. I have tested in Fire Fox on two separate computers with the same result. My first thought was this was a problem with bad HTML, but it sounds like you have it working ok so maybe I am saving or setting it up wrong.

FH

[encyclo]

MS Office's HTML is so bad and so IE-specific that it is difficult to fix. One workaround I have tried is to use OpenOffice.org Calc instead of Excel to open the file, then convert it to HTML using that.

Assuming that Calc can read the file (compatibility is usually excellent), the HTML produced - whilst not brilliant - is much more cross-browser friendly and robust than MS-Office-generated markup.

[Fortune Hunter]

encyclo:

I will try that. I am downloading Open Office as I reply to this. Thanks for the suggestion.

FH