Number 205 - June 2000

Web Literacy
by Bob Russell, January 2000 North Texas PC News NTPCUG member & Microsoft Office and Consumer Support
This article is extracted from a Microsoft Web site, and is intended to provide the information that will encourage those who hesitate to publish to the Web. Web sites are fast becoming the medium of choice for many. I have talked with many seniors who found a new lease in life from their Web publishing activities after retirement. Some of them had started businesses, others just worked on it as a means of self-expression -but all enjoy the satisfaction that comes from expressing their creativity, and the confirmation that others enjoy seeing their work. An Introduction To Working on the Web With Office 2000     Learning how to work effectively on the Web - whether it's the Internet, or a corporate intranet - is fast becoming necessary for business success. Office 2000 offers many tools to help you publish documents to the Web, edit and update them, and share Web-based information with customers or coworkers. Office 2000 can also make it easier for you to hold meetings and broadcast presentations over the Internet. This month, the Office Update Focus highlights many of these new tools and offers ways to incorporate the Web into your everyday work. Creating Documents That Live on the Web     Office 2000 offers many ways to put your documents on the Web. You can create them in their native format, for example in Word, and then publish them to the Web in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). The formatting you add to your Word document translates automatically into HTML.     Read more about round-trip editing capabilities in "Use Office 2000 to Edit Documents Posted to the Web".     If you are concerned about how different formatting abilities in Office 2000 appear in different browsers, or you'd like to manipulate formatting for various browsers, read the "Microsoft Office 2000 Browser Compatibility White Paper". Creating and Managing a Web Site     Web sites can be anything from one simple page to a very complex site that contains numerous pages and links. FrontPage 2000 has many tools to help you keep track of your site. "Fixing Broken Hyperlinks in FrontPage 2000-Based Webs" will show you how FrontPage makes sure your links go somewhere. Use FrontPage reports to track when pages need updating, when site navigation needs some work, or when pages are orphaned.     Publisher easily allows you to create great-looking smaller Web sites that are consistent with your printed publications. Publisher offers the tools to help you	design and publish Web pages easily. Read "Your Publisher 2000 Web Site: An Overview" to learn how to build a Web site using Publisher. E-mail and the Web     When you want to create a more formal e-mail document, use the HTML paragraph styles to make it easy. By using paragraph styles you can define how the text looks, in addition to defining formatting elements such as numbered lists and bullets without having to apply these styles individually to each word. The paragraph styles apply to an entire paragraph. For more information read, "Apply HTML Styles to an Outlook 2000 Message".     You can also now send a Web page in e-mail and ensure that all the supporting files are bundled together when you download the Web Archive tool from Office Update. "E-mail a Web Page as a Single E-mail Attachment with Office 2000" explains how the Web Archive tool works. Publishing Charts and Spreadsheets to the Web     This month, learn more about how the new Web Components work in "Publish a Chart and Worksheet to a Web Page with Office 2000". With the Web Components, you can create a worksheet and chart in Excel, for example, and then publish them to the Web as interactive data. With the help of this focus article, you can download the accompanying spreadsheet and chart and practice publishing them yourself, or delete the practice data and enter your own to work with. Meeting and Collaborating on the Web     You can now meet online and collaborate on documents during the meeting with Microsoft NetMeeting and Office 2000. If you need to work on a document with someone who works in another location, there's no need to get on a plane. You can schedule an online meeting with your co-worker and arrange for the document you want to collaborate on to be available during the meeting. To learn how online meetings with NetMeeting work, read "Schedule and Meet Online in Office 2000 with Net-Meeting".     Another way to discuss documents online is to use the new Discussions and Web Folders features. First, your system administrator needs to set up the Microsoft Office Server Extensions and a Web server designate4. as a Discussions server, and then you can publish documents to a folder you set up on the server. Inform colleagues that they can add comments by using the Discussions toolbar. Read how to use Discussions and Web Folders in "Discussions - A New Way to Collaborate Online with Office 2000" and at ("Web Folders: A New Way to Share Information in Office 2000"). If you have a topic of issue you would like to have us deal with, send e-mail to questions@microsoft.com. We may be able to provide some answers you've been looking for.
Number 205 - June 2000