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Explore the different formats in which you can save data from Office applications

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A few months ago I posted about [what I think is] a neat way of using Outlook's ability to save as HTML. Today when compiling a powerpoint presentation, it occurred to me that there are a lot of formats that Office applications can save into that I find useful, and it's worth highlighting a few more:

  • In Word, save as a “Single File Web Page (*.mht, *.mhtml)“, especially if you're uploading to a sharepoint or other shared location where others will be viewing the file, as IE can render the MHTs much quicker than it can load winword.exe to host a .doc (and without the annoying prompt). This keeps all graphics and text inline in a single file, versus saving as .htm which creates a 'thicket' (one .htm file and a subfolder with graphics/etc that are referenced from the .htm).
  • In Excel, save as .mht, and check the “Add interactivity“ checkbox, which will allow you to have a more dynamic spreadsheet-in-a-webpage with sorting capabilities
  • In Powerpoint, save a slide as a GIF, JPG, PNG or a few other graphical formats. This is useful if you want to do some significant modification to an image (for example, today I had a need to take a chart from a slide and make a large poster out of it, so I saved it as PNG and blew it up in photoshop and added a few things)
  • In Powerpoint, if you have a deck with mostly text in it, save it as .RTF to get an outline format that can be read by anyone with wordpad.
  • And of course, in many Office 2003 apps you can save as XML... And everyone already knows how awesome that is, right? : -)

Comments

  • Anonymous
    July 21, 2004

    Still missing a few however : VML, HTML+MSO.

    Whether apps export to some xml or whatever is not the point : either they provide round-tripping or they set their users for a bad journey.

    MHT (or web archive) : yeah, right. Take a look at the sizes. When you see a regular web page can make a 300kb MHT with ease, what might larger documents become? This certainly not does any good to the bandwidth.
  • Anonymous
    July 21, 2004
    OpenOffice can save as PDF and SWF, which is very convienient. It's odd - from a consumer point of view - that a free office suite supports PDF, while the semi-expensive MS Office doesn't.

    MHT is nice, but isn't nearly as portable as PDF.

    Is lack of PDF support a legal / anti-antitrust thing?
  • Anonymous
    July 21, 2004
    My intention was not to produce an exhaustive list, anyone can see that just from looking at the dialog themselves. I was describing the ones that I find most useful.

    I was actually joking with the XML thing. I don't personally find it that important for what I do with Office. But it's such a buzzword :-)

    File size is not always a concern. For specifications and other docs on the intranet I'm reading regularly, I don't care what size they are.

    I have no knowledge of the issues with PDF. Personally, I don't need my documents to be portable between a huge variety of systems, just easily accessible from a few different machines which are all running windows XP, and so I find MHT quite useful as I don't like having to open up helper apps in the browser to load certain filetypes.
  • Anonymous
    July 21, 2004
    Makes sense. I'm a big fan of MHT, and PDF reader has been pretty unstable for me lately (http://weblogs.asp.net/jgalloway/archive/2004/07/08/177585.aspx for instance). MHT isn't as reliable for standardized printing, though, so when I need to send a read-only printable document I'm often stuck with PDF.

    It's too bad the Mozilla browsers have such poor MHT support.
  • Anonymous
    July 22, 2004
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    July 26, 2004
    I want to disable the temp file creation of WORD. When ever i opens the word file,
    it creates the temp file in temp folder of currently login user. The temp file name preced
    with ~WROXXXXX.doc. Please tell me how do i prevent temp file creation.

    I want to disable this temp file creation feature of word through programming. I am using VBA , VC++ for automation of WORD

    Could you please tell me how do I proceed via VBA or VC++ ?

    Regards,
    Vishal
  • Anonymous
    July 26, 2004
    I want to disable the temp file creation of WORD. When ever i opens the word file,
    it creates the temp file in temp folder of currently login user. The temp file name preced
    with ~WROXXXXX.doc. Please tell me how do i prevent temp file creation.

    I want to disable this temp file creation feature of word through programming. I am using VBA , VC++ for automation of WORD

    Could you please tell me how do I proceed via VBA or VC++ ?

    Regards,
    Vishal