Three Options to Save a MS Word Page as an HTML Web Page

© Ugur Akinci
Granted, no professional web designer would use MS Word to design a web page. There are much better tools for that out there like the mother-of-all-HTM-editors DreamWeaver.
However, there are also times when you may not have ready access to a web designer or when you’d like to post up a page quickly on the web. In those situations MS Word can do a moderately satisfactory job of generating a web page.
MS Word provides you 3 options to create an HTML web page by using the “saving as” option when you’re saving your file:

·    Saving as a “Web Page”.
·    Saving as “Web Page, Filtered”.
·    Saving as a “Single File Web Page”.

(1) WEB PAGE
When you are “saving as” your document, from the “Save as Type” drop-down list, select “Web Page” option.
“Round Tripping” is the name given to MS Word’s ability to save a page both with HTML tags and all the Word tags so that you can switch back and forth between the normal Word page view and the HTML web view.
One drawback of this feature is the bloated file size since the same file retains not only the Word tags but all the related HTML tags as well.
(2) WEB PAGE, FILTERED
If you’d like to save your Word document purely as an HTML document, without any embedded Word tags, then when you are “saving as” your document, from the “Save as Type” drop-down list, select “Web Page, Filtered” option. Some people use this option to generate an Amazon Kindle version of their documents.
This option will reduce your file size. One drawback is, if you have images in your Word page, this option will save all images in an accompanying folder and use the images “by reference.” So when you are uploading your HTML file to a server or distributing it through email you have to remember to include this image file as well. On a web server, this folder needs to be in the same directory as your HTML file or else the images will look like they are missing.



(3) SINGLE FILE WEB PAGE
This “save as” option creates an “.mht” file and takes care of the above shortcoming since it saves all images together with the text itself.
This of course again increases the file size. Although you won’t have any missing image issues, you have to make sure that your email client can send it through or your web browser can display the “.mht” file properly.