About Dawn Douglas Expertise I can answer most questions about Microsoft Publisher.
Experience I have been using Microsoft Publisher for 11 years. I started with Adobe InDesign and Pagemaker. I like Microsoft Publisher for it's ease of use.
Education/Credentials I am self taught in Microsoft Publisher. I learned by doing.
Question I have MS Publisher 2007 running on Vista. I would like to convert a .pub file to full html but Pub '07 just creates a .gif file, so-called "filtered html". I understand Pub '03 creates html. Does it work on Vista? Can I install both Pub '03 and '07 at the same time? If I have paid for '07 can I get '03 for free? Or is there some other program I can use to do the conversion? Thanks.
Answer Hi Mark,
Wow lots of questions. Let me take them one at a time.
The only type of .pub files that will save as html documents are the individual web pages you save. Those webpage html files are not created until you select publish to web. Then all your pages are created, including your index page, and any other webpage etc... are organized in a folder. While it is still a working document, it will be a .pub file. This is the same process whether it's 2003 or 2007 version of publisher. It doesn't prepare your html files until you're ready to publish to the web. Once you select the option the folder is automatically created and all the images etc... are saved in their appropriate folders for upload to your host server.
Publisher creates filtered html regardless of the operating system. The filtered html allows publisher to be a decent WYSIWYG web authoring tool. You can insert html code into your created document using the Web tool bar and selecting the html code fragment tool. You can view the entire html source file by loading it into any browser and using the view source option. Once you have the view source, you can copy the entire html file into any html editor (notepad is a easy free editor) and make minor changes. Just keep in mind that it is filtered html, not html 4.0 standard so there will be a ton of additional coding that you may not recognize. Filtered html is impossible to truly validate so you will have to wing it.
Yes you can run both publisher 2003 and 2007 on the same system, just install them in their own separate folders. You can even run use the compatibility function to run them on the XP platform if you like.
If you paid for 2007, you cannot get 2003 free. Sorry, that's not how it works. You don't need a separate program to convert, 2007 is backwards compatible. You can open a 2003 file in a 2007. You can open an Office Publisher 2007 file in Publisher 2003 or Publisher 2002, but certain features are not supported. If you reopen the same file in Office Publisher 2007, the features that were not supported in earlier versions of Publisher will be available again.
