BinaryWolf

Clean Up Word HTML

Haven’t tried this yet, but worth a look for the next time I have to convert a large Word document to HTML.

I recently received a rather lengthy and somewhat elaborate MS Word document, which I was asked to convert to HTML for uploading to a 3rd party’s website. My first instinct was to save the Word document as HTML and use Dreamweaver’s “Clean Up Word HTML” Command. But not only did I have to leave it running all night for Dreamweaver to finish “cleaning”, but the results were far from desirable in my opinion. There were still a lot of left over inline styles, etc. that Dreamweaver just plain missed.

I approached it differently this morning and just selected the entire document in Word, copied it, and then pasted it into Dreamweaver’s Design window. Not only was it much, much faster, but the output code was much, much cleaner! I didn’t have to run the “Clean Up Word HTML” Command afterwords either.

Moral of the story: If you get an HTML document that was created using Word: yes, clean it up. But if you get a Word Document and need to convert it to HTML, don’t waste your time converting it to HTML with Word and cleaning it up, just copy and paste it!