Lesson One: Office ’97 Applications on the Web

Tutorial One: Office ’97 Applications on the Web

Part One: Using Excel to Put a Table On-line

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Example: Spreadsheet of Student Grades

Procedure:

Step 1: Turn on "Internet Assistant Wizard" add-in feature. Go to Tools pulldown menu. Choose Add-ins. Click the "Internet Assistant Wizard" box. By completing this step, you have added the ability to save tables as html documents. In addition to Save and Save As, the File menu should now have the additional option Save As HTML.
Step 2: Design a new spreadsheet with desired fields and formulae. Suggested format: Student Name, SSN, homework grades, test grades, course grade. If you are familiar with the more advanced features of Excel, you can also add formulae to calculate the final grade.
Step 3: When your spreadsheet is in its final form with all data entered and formatted properly, select Save from the File menu. Save this version as an excel spreadsheet. It will be used only by you to update student grades. Once this step is completed, you are ready to convert the same table to html for web publishing.
Step 4: Under the File menu, select Save as HTML. Excel will walk you through a four step process for creating your html table. Note: In step one, be very careful to highlight only the fields you want to show on-line. By including the "SSN" field but not the "Name" field, you can create a confidential grade report. I would suggest using the "Independent ready-to-view" document option in the second step. When you are finished with these four steps, your new html formatted grade report is finished. Simply move it to the server by ftp and link it to your course homepage.
Step 5: Update the Excel version as the semester progresses. After you complete updates in the Excel version, repeat steps 3 and 4 to generate a new, updated HTML version.

Additional Notes:

Reasons for choosing Excel instead of Composer or Word when creating on-line tables: 1) Excel allows calculations to be done automatically, 2) Merging, inserting /deleting and formatting cells is simpler, 3) Data is managed off-line in the Excel version, allowing some fields to be hidden (i.e. student name), 4) Word doesn’t always convert table to html neatly, 5) Once file is created in Excel, additional formatting can be done in Composer (i.e. background colors, additional title or footer information, cell widths).
Drawbacks of using Excel: 1) Cell widths can not be defined, but are based on length of data, 2) Cell padding, margins, borders cannot be customized, 3) Not as many color choices.

Part Two: Putting Your Powerpoint Presentation On-line

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Example: Term Project Presentations for GIS Course

Procedure:

Step 1: Create presentation in Powerpoint.
Step 2: When Powerpoint presentation is finalized, select Save As HTML from the File menu.
Step 3: Powerpoint will walk you through several steps to customize your on-line presentation. The following options are available:

Layout Selection: frames or no frames
Graphics Types: GIF, JPEG, or Powerpoint Animation (may require additional software)
Graphics Size: both resolution of images (640x480 to 1280x1024) and width of slide ( ¼, ½, ¾, full screen)
Information page: your e-mail, your homepage
Colors and Buttons: default browser settings or customize background, text, link and followed link colors.
Layout Options: placement of navigation buttons, inclusion of notes
Choose location to save html version.
If you want to remember the settings you selected, you can save them and use them again later.

Step 4: After choosing all of the customized settings in Step 3, Powerpoint will export the each slide in both a text version and a graphics version. It will also create an index page for easy navigation complete with your e-mail and homepage address. All of the html-coded files are saved in one folder that can be moved (via ftp) to the server. Note: These files are internally linked. ALL files MUST be moved as a group (in the same folder) to the server.
Step 5: After moving the presentation to the server, you need to link the presentation to your homepage. You have the option of either linking to the Index page (Index.html) or the first slide (sld001.html).

Additional Notes: When deciding whether to use the frames or no-frames interface, consider your audience. Is it likely that their browser supports frames?

When linking your presentation to your homepage, you link directly to the index page or to the first slide. The index page gives the user a better idea of the overall structure of your presentation. The first slide may be more visually interesting and draw the user into your presentation.

If you want to integrate your website and your Powerpoint presentation, you can make links from your website to individual slides. This approach allows you to provide more flexible, text-heavy descriptions of each slide. This can be important if you want to provide more details about each slide. An alternate approach, would be to use the "Notes" feature of Powerpoint to annotate each slide. However, the "Notes" method will result in smaller slides.

Be careful with graphics, resolution can be lost with detailed images.

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Created on 6/1/98, Last Modified 6/2/98, dscott@mail.utexas.edu