Tips for Excel, Word, PowerPoint and Other Applications

Save As Options for Websites

Have you ever needed to send someone a website that they'll want to access while offline or did you want to save a website for archival or later perusal? Instead of sending someone a link via e-mail, you can go to the File Menu then select Save As. You will be presented with 4 options, which are described below:

Save As option	Extension	What is it good for?
Web Page, Complete	.htm	When you save a web page as a Web Page, Complete, you end up with 2 outputs. You get an *.htm file and a folder called *_files. The *_files contains all of the graphics, style sheets, scripts, etc, that were originally embedded in a page. Not only that, the elements are saved in their original format, so a page with lots of JPG graphics will save all of these graphics in .JPG form in the *_files folder. The downside of this method is the creation of the additional folder. Sometimes it's harder to share a website if you have to attach a folder full of scripts, graphics, and files that your end user might not know what to do with it.
Web Archive, Single File	.mht	When you need to save a web page as a single, all inclusive file, Save As "Web archive, single file". This will generate a .mht (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension HTML) file that retains formatting and graphics. Those will be embedded in the file rather than being saved in a separate folder like you would get when saving as Web Page, Complete. This is best used when the formatting and graphical content is critical to the usefulness of the page, for example a web page with lots of explanatory diagrams. This gives you a single file that you can email around without worrying about your users trying to figure out what to do with all of the received files. Note, graphics files get embedded as bitmaps (.bmp) so the resulting file may be a bit larger than it would be had you saved as a Web Page, Complete.
Web Page, HTML only	.htm	If you only ned the raw HTML you would Save As "Web Page, HTML only". It will simply save the current page's source HTML to your drive intact but will not retain any graphics, scripts, or style sheets. This means that if you launch the saved page from your local system, you'll most likely see a lot of broken links. This is most useful for pages that are mostly text, like news articles, where you may not care about or need the graphics..
Text File	.txt	As you might expect, this simply generates a .txt file with just the pure text of a web page in a single column of text. Again, this is most useful if all you need is the text of an article or just want to clear formatting so that you can extract pieces of a web page's content.