Office X for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

chapter 7: word meets web 277

chapter

7

I

t may be that this Internet thing has gotten out of control. It seems as though

every piece of self-respecting software, from databases to games, has been

Internet-enabled. Where would you be if you couldn’t convert, say, your recipe

file into a Web page for all the world to see?

PowerPoint, Excel, and Entourage are capable of converting your slide shows, spread-

sheets, and calendars into Web pages. But for traditional, everyday Web pages,

Microsoft intends Word to be the Web workhorse.

Word as Web Browser

In truth, Word isn’t much of a Web browser. It does have a Web toolbar (choose

View→Toolbars→Web), complete with Back, Forward, Stop, Refresh, and Home

buttons (see Figure 7-1). There’s even a Favorites menu, which you may be delighted

to discover comes populated with the bookmarks in your Internet Explorer Favor-

ites menu.

Word Meets Web

Figure 7-1:

When you type a Web address

in the box in the Web toolbar,

Word launches Internet Explorer

(or whichever browser is

selected on the Web tab of your

Internet control panel) and

opens that Web page. You don’t

even have to type the “www” or

“.com”.

278 office x for macintosh: the missing manual

But this toolbar is actually just a remote control for Internet Explorer itself. When-

ever you use one of its controls or type an address into its Address bar, your Web

browser launches (if it isn’t open already) and handles the actual task of displaying

the Web page in question.

Opening Web Pages from the Web

That’s not to say, however, that Word can’t display Web pages in its own window,

because it can. Just choose File→Open Web Page; a small dialog box appears, in

which you can type the URL (Web address) of the Web page you want. When you

click OK, Word connects to the Net and brings the specified page into its own win-

dow.

Unfortunately, Word is really only the strange preteen cousin of Internet Explorer;

not only do Web pages take a long time to appear in Word windows, but they may

also look peculiar, with a shuffled layout, enormous margins, unpredictable movie

capabilities, and other anomalies. Still, this feature may be just the ticket when you

want to grab some text out of a Web page article you just read. By bringing text into

Word, you can copy, paste, reformat, and perform other editing tricks.

Tip: When you open in Word any kind of Web-related document—a Web page, a Web template from the

Project Gallery, a Word document you’ve saved as a Web page, or any other HTML file—it automatically

opens in Online Layout view. If you ever find that you can’t see images, background colors, or other Web

features in your document, you’ve probably somehow gotten into the wrong view. Choose View→Online

Layout.

Opening Web Pages from Your Hard Drive

These days, documents that have been written using the HTML Web-design lan-

guage are no longer confined to the Internet. Because they’re relatively small, in-

clude formatting, and open with equal ease on Macs, Windows PCs, and every other

kind of computer, HTML documents are now a common exchange format for Read

Me files, software user manuals, and the like. (You know when you have one because

its file name ends with .htm or .html.)

Word can open such documents directly: Just launch Word and choose File→Open,

then navigate to the file on your Mac and click Open. The file opens into Word’s

Online Layout view. Hyperlinks work, but otherwise the file acts more like a Word

document than a Web page. For example:

• Scrolling text (see page 286) doesn’t scroll.

• Animated GIFs, such as Active Graphics (see page 282) work, but only in Online

Layout view.

• Movies designed to play automatically (and anything else requiring a Web-browser

plug-in) don’t work.

Word as

Web Browser