Microsoft Word Pages

I am not the only web designer to beg people not to build websites with Microsoft Word! Just because a program says it CAN produce HTML code, is not a reason to use it to build a site!

Word is not the only program to claim that it can write HTML code in addition to its stated purpose, but Word and Excel are the two WORST programs to try to use for the task!

You see, when a program has a primary purpose, and then writes HTML code as an afterthought, it rarely does a good job because nobody is concerned with really getting it to work right. In fact, programs which were designed specifically for writing HTML code are also flawed - it is the nature of the beast, that it takes a great deal of tweaking and patching just to get one to write acceptable code at all. Just ask users of DreamWeaver, or Front Page!

But when you take a program that was created for an entirely different purpose, and try to make it write HTML code, it will unavoidably do a worse job than one that is created with that express purpose in mind. Many Publishing programs and word processing programs will produce HTML code, but they do not necessarily do a good job of it. Open Office is perhaps the most acceptable one, but it does some awfully weird things too.

Word and Excel though, have taken the prize for sheer code bloat and warped code. Excel produces the same kind of code that Word does, so from here on out you can group them together. Bloated code means that it takes them 5 lines of code to describe what other programs take 1 line to describe. And 5 times as much code means 5 times as long to load the page. That is on the simple pages. Some pages produce even more convoluted and redundant code!

But if that were its only problem, we'd not have so much reason to complain. It is, alas, just the beginning of Word's offenses! It also uses proprietary code. That is, Microsoft has again decided that no matter what the rest of the world is doing, they have to do it their own way (if it were superior, we'd understand, but I have yet to meet the computer guru who was not on the payroll of Microsoft who thought that ANYTHING that Microsoft produced was superior!). It uses code that is not even HTML code, but which some (but not all) browsers have incorporated into their programming. The problems with that extra code are legion.

The code produces further bloat, and it is unpredictable. It shows up differently from browser to browser - in fact MOST code does, but the differences with Word code are not minor, nor do they look at all similar!

Links fail to work, elements appear in strange places, and content gets lost in a sea of code that search engines won't bother to wade through. Page widths display unpredictably, page lengths can go on for miles whether there is content to fill them or not, and not even Internet Explorer interprets the code correctly - you'd think that Microsoft programs would at least work with each other, but apparently the attitude of doing it their own way carries over to individual departments as well.

So, it is our opinion that nobody who wished to produce a functional page would EVER use this program! And ANYBODY who knows even the basics about web design would recoil in horror at the thought of actually uploading unaltered code created by Word.

Since copying and pasting from one program to another in Windows now preserves HTML code, even copying content from a Word document and putting it into an HTML editor can create a problem in an otherwise acceptable document. Many programs though, do have the ability to "clean up HTML code", and some even have the option of stripping out MS Office generated code - you see, I told you it isn't just ME that has a problem with it! You'll probably still have to strip out STYLE and SPAN tags to get your page to display with your own stylesheet though.

With web pages, small problems with code are unavoidable, and usually won't cause problems. But the code IS the page. HTML is a language which tells the browser how to display a page - it is a list of instructions. Put this item there, put this item here, make this border this color, etc. So getting code that shows things predictably, and which is efficient is important. Minor issues are pretty common, and usually not visible, but the gargantuan problems that Word produces are visible on the surface - in the form of slow pages and radically unpredictable behavior.

If you have to create a web page, and you lack software to do the job simply in a graphical environment, then download a free copy of NVU. It isn't perfect either, but it will sure do a better job than MS Word!

Written by Laura Wheeler