Have you ever wanted to create a document in Microsoft Word, PowerPoint®, Excel, or any other Office program, post it to the Web, and then open it to edit later? Now you can modify and republish Web pages you created using the capabilities of Office 2000.

With the editing functions of Office 2000 you can create a document in any Office 2000 program and save it as a Web page, with all the data, formatting and Office document settings saved in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) automatically. Then, once your page has been published to the Web, you can open it again. Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 can tell which program was used to create your document, and opens the Web page in that program when you select Edit on the File menu.

With Internet Explorer 5 and Office 2000, you can seamlessly transfer content and formatting between the Web and your desktop. In addition to making changes after you've posted a document to the Web, you can also use the Internet or your intranet for Web-enabled collaboration. Using Project Workgroup features on an intranet, you can use the Web or an intranet to transport messages, resources, and tasks essential to your team-based projects.

Opening your document from the Web

After your document has been posted to the Web, you can open it again to revise it using the editing capabilities of Office 2000. Internet Explorer 5 automatically gives you the option to open the page in the program you used to create it.

For example, if you used Word to create your document, then on the File menu in Internet Explorer select Edit with Microsoft Word, or click the Edit button on the toolbar.

In PowerPoint, you can also Save a PowerPoint presentation as a Web page. Then you can use the titles that appear in the Outline pane as hyperlinks that allow you to move from slide to slide within your presentation. To edit these or any other part of your Web presentation, on the File menu in Internet Explorer select Edit with PowerPoint, or click the Edit button on the toolbar.

If you are using Excel, you can save an entire workbook as an HTML file or you can publish an interactive spreadsheet. When you save a workbook in HTML format, you can open it into a browser. In this case, the data on the Web page is static, but you can modify the file by opening it in Excel. To create the HTML version of the workbook, you must save the workbook using the Entire Workbook option in the Save As Web Page dialog box (File menu).

Interactive spreadsheets on Web pages — worksheets that allow you to make changes to the data and see the results calculated automatically — can be published from Excel as well. To make changes to the design of interactive spreadsheets, you must modify the spreadsheet in a design application such as Microsoft FrontPage®. When you Publish interactive data to the Web by using Excel and FrontPage, you publish the spreadsheet data in HTML format from Excel and then use FrontPage to modify the Web page as well as the spreadsheet. To understand the differences between saving an HTML version of a workbook and publishing an interactive spreadsheet, read Saving versus publishing Web pages in Excel 2000.

You can also save an Excel workbook, a Word template, or any other Office document in a Web Folder, and make modifications to the original document. Working with Web folders in Office lets you make shortcuts to a Web server, and gives you more ways to share information and collaborate with others.

Once you've saved the changes you made in HTML format in any Office 2000 application, publish your file to the Web again, and the changes you've made will appear.