With the phenomenal and exciting growth of the Internet, more and more of us are becoming interested in contributing information to the World Wide Web as well as consuming information on it. And with private intranets becoming an increasingly vital means for sharing information within companies and for working on collaborative projects, many information workers are now required to publish documents on an intranet as well as merely reading them. Publishing on the World Wide Web or on a private intranet, however, has traditionally been a fairly technical task, usually the province of Webmasters, programmers, and other specialists. And it has been unreasonable to expect those with other specialties to add Web publishing to their current skills.
Office 97 directly addresses this problem in a significant way. With this latest version of Microsoft's Office suite, anyone who can create an Office document can now publish on the Web. Converting an Office 97 document to the proper format and publishing it on the Web is scarcely more difficult than sending a document to the laser printer on your desk. Using the Office applications, you can quickly publish memos, reports, manuals, catalogs, proposals, budgets, product lists, or presentations—to mention just a few possibilities. Or, you can create entire informational Web sites for companies or individuals. And you can include in your pages graphic images, backgrounds, videos, sound clips, scrolling text marquees, animations, tables, forms, and many other features.
Although Office 97 certainly makes Web publishing quick and simple, don't mistake it for a beginner's Web publishing tool. Office provides advantages over even specialized Web publishing applications. For example, when you create Web documents, you can use the powerful editing features provided by Office applications—such as Word's automatic text correction, Access's database creation wizards, and Excel's automatic formatting. Also, you can use Office to create unique, special-purpose publications—such as worksheets with charts, interactive databases, and animated multimedia presentations.
In addition to its Web publishing facilities, Office 97 also provides tools for accessing resources on the Internet or on company intranets. For example, you can use the new Web toolbar to browse Internet sites; you can insert hyperlinks within Office documents that you can click on to open Internet documents; and you can open or save Office documents directly on the Internet. You can also use Excel or Access to import and analyze information from the Web.
When you first approach Office 97, however, you may find it difficult to get a handle on all the Web publishing and Internet features it provides, and hard to determine which Office application is best for publishing each type of Web document. This is because the Web publishing and Internet features are scattered throughout the menus, toolbars, and dialog boxes of five major Office applications, and also because the online help on these features is buried in a vast amount of other information.
Here is where Mastering Microsoft Office 97 Web Publishing comes to the rescue. This book focuses exclusively on the Web publishing and other Internet features of Office 97, tying all the techniques and concepts together within a single teaching and reference book. It's designed to help you pick the best Office tool to perform each Web publishing or Internet task, and to teach you how to use each of these tools productively. It's a book you can turn to whenever your work with Office involves the World Wide Web, the Internet, or an intranet.
The new Office Web publishing tools stand as a remarkable achievement for the programmers who created them. Yet, because they're such a recent addition to Office, they're still a bit rough in spots, and the online help often seems a little sketchy. This book was written to help smooth out the rough areas by providing many undocumented tips, cautions, and workarounds. It also tells you all the steps you need to complete each procedure, filling in important steps not covered by the online help. And, the book often goes beyond the documentation to provide useful and interesting advanced methods that will help you meet your Web publishing challenges.
Overview of the Book
In Part I (Chapters 1 and 2). the book presents the basic ideas and techniques that are common to all the Office applications. Chapter 1 explains the fundamental Internet concepts and terms that are used throughout the book (including some of the terms used in this introduction). It also provides an overview of all the Web publishing and other Internet features of Office 97, and it helps you select the best Office application to use for each task. Chapter 2 begins the presentation of the actual techniques for publishing on the Web and for accessing the Internet. The information in this chapter applies to all the major Office applications: Word, Excel, Access, and PowerPoint.
The remainder of the book covers the specific ways to use each of the Office applications. All the chapters in Part II (Chapters 3 through 6) cover Microsoft Word. More pages are devoted to Word than to any of the other Office applications, because Word offers the largest set of tools designed specifically for creating Web pages. In this part you'll first learn the basic procedures for using Word's Web publishing features (Chapter 3). You'll then discover how to add text, lists, tables, and forms to your Web pages (Chapter 4); how to add graphic images, videos, and sound clips (Chapter 5); and how to add frames, applets, and other advanced features (Chapter 6).
In Part III (Chapters 7 through 13), you'll learn how to work with the other major Office applications: Excel, Access, and PowerPoint. In the Excel chapters (7 through 9), you'll find out how to publish Excel worksheets and charts for displaying data; how to publish Excel forms for gathering information; and how to import and analyze data from Web sites. The Access chapters (10 through 12) explain how to publish various database objects on the Web (datasheets, forms, and reports) and how to import data from the Web. The PowerPoint chapter (13) shows you how to publish simple presentations, as well as multimedia presentations that can include animations, sound clips, and videos.
Part IV (Chapters 14 and 15) discusses ways to use the Internet features of other Office applications. In Chapter 14, you'll learn how to use Outlook to organize your Internet addresses, to browse Internet sites, and to send and receive Internet e-mail messages. And you'll learn how to use Binder to browse Internet sites and to open or save documents on the Internet. Chapter 15 explains how to set up and use the Personal Web Server program for publishing Internet documents on your own computer (although Personal Web Server isn't included with Office 97, it can be downloaded free of charge and is designed to support all the document types that you can publish with Office).
Finally, the Appendix introduces the Microsoft FrontPage Web publishing application It explains why you might want to obtain this program, and shows how you can use it in conjunction with Office 97. (FrontPage isn't included with Office 97—you must purchase it separately.)
How to Use the Book
Whatever your Web publishing needs might be, you should begin by reading the two chapters in Part I. These chapters will teach you the basic concepts, definitions, and techniques. They'll also help you select the best Office application to use to accomplish each of your goals, and they'll refer you to the appropriate chapters and sections in the book.
You can then go immediately to the chapters covering the particular application you've decided to use. Provided that you've read Part I, the groups of chapters on each Office application are largely self-sufficient. For example, you don't need to read the Word chapters to understand the Excel chapters. There might, however, be some interdependence within a group of chapters on a specific application. For instance, Chapter 3 describes the general procedures for creating Web pages in Word, while Chapters 4 and 5 fill in the details.
