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Saving a Worksheet as HTML

Excel 2003 and 2002 both have HTML support built-in as standard.

Excel 2000 can actually use HTML as a native file format which can be saved and reopened without the loss of any information.

Macros, Charts, Pivot Tables and worksheet settings were all saved with the Excel 2000 HTML file format.

Excel 97 included a simple add-in that could be used to convert simple Excel ranges (including a chart) into simple HTML.

Saving a Worksheet as a web page (HTML)

Create a new workbook and add some basic data and a formula to Sheet1.

Lets also include some very simple formatting as well.

Delete all the other worksheets from this workbook so your workbook only contains one worksheet.

Select (File > Save As Web Page) to display the SaveAs dialog box.

Make sure that you select the Entire Workbook option and enter a file name for this webpage.

When you save the entire workbook each worksheet will be saved to a separate HTMl file.

For this example we have chosen the file name "simplewebpage" and have changed the folder path to "C:\Temp\"

You can then browse to this file and open it from within Internet Explorer.

Looking at the Source Code

For any HTML file you can have a look at the actual HTML code by selecting (View > Source).

There is too much HTML to display it all here but for such a simple example you might be surprised just how much code there is.

In this case entire workbook can be represented by a single HTML file.

This is not always the case though only for simple worksheets.

More complicated Worksheets

When you save charts and other graphics these images (plus other files) are saved in a sub directory.

All these files are necessary to recreate the Excel workbook when the HTML file is reopend in Excel.

3 HTMl files, Gif files, CSS file and an XML file, MSO file.

If you need to transfer you HTML file to another location you must also include all the other supporting files.

Things to Remember

There is a very handy wizard that can convert worksheets into HTML. Charts are currently converted to GIF images. The tables and charts, once converted are not linked.