MS FrontPage —

Working with Excel and FrontPage

Just as with Word, you can copy and paste content or convert Excel files to a Web page. However, when it comes to Excel, FrontPage offers some additional options. You can incorporate a spreadsheet or pivot table (a tool for manipulating lots of data) in your Web page and let viewers interact with it. You can even display the same data as a chart.

Copying Tables from Excel into FrontPage

One very simple solution to crossing the Excel-FrontPage divide is to select a bunch of cells in Excel, copy them (Ctrl+C), and then paste them (Ctrl+V) onto your page in FrontPage. FrontPage places them in a table, which is invisible to visitors. Of course, you can format this table any way you like. (Improving Your Web Page tells you all about working with tables.)

In fact, you don't even need to open your file in Excel. You can drag an Excel file onto a Web page from Windows Explorer. If you do so, FrontPage pastes spreadsheet content onto your Web page within a transparent table.

Saving an Excel Sheet as a Web Page

As with Word, you can instantly transform an Excel worksheet, part of worksheet, or an entire workbook (a collection of worksheets) into a Web page. To do so, first open the workbook in Excel.

  1. Select the data you want to convert.

    If you want only to turn part of a worksheet into a Web page, select all the cells that make up the area. Otherwise, select nothing.

  2. Initiate the conversion.

    Select File » Save As Web Page. In the Save As dialog box that opens, specify whether you want to convert the Entire Workbook or the selection you made in step 1.

  3. Tell Excel how much of your workbook you'd like to convert.

    Select Entire Workbook to convert all sheets, or choose Selection: Sheet if you just want to turn the active sheet into a Web page.

  4. Select a file type to save as.

    Within the long drop-down list to the right of "Save as type," choose either Web Page or Single File Web Page (see the box on Moving From Word Into FrontPage to learn what the difference is).

  5. Name the file you're about to create.

    Excel's automated file monikers are about as exciting as FrontPage's. In the File Name field, type in a short, descriptive name. (As always don't include capitals, spaces, or special characters.)

  6. Click Title and enter a proper title for you new Web page.

  7. Select a location.

    Browse to the directory (probably a folder in your Web site) where you'd like to save the new HTML file.

  8. Click Publish or Save.

  • If you click Save, Excel creates the new HTML version of your presentation.

  • If you click Publish, you gain a few advantages. For starters, you can set additional options to configure the HTML result. For example, you can single out any one of your workbook's sheets for publishing.

Another advantage is that the Publish option produces an HTML page that's somewhat less cluttered than the Save function does. This is important because, like its equivalent operation in Word, the "Save as Web page" method fills your pages with a lot of extraneous code. The Publish function, as its name suggests, creates a Web page truly intended for display.

After you've set your options, click Publish.

If you turn on the "Add Interactivity" checkbox when you publish, you can create a spreadsheet or pivot table Web component, which you'll read about in the next section.

After you click Save (or Publish a second time), Excel creates the Web file.

Excelling with the Database Results Wizard

You can also use the Database Results Wizard to display data from an Excel database. (See The Database ResultsWizards for details on working with the Database Results Wizard.) To do so, you create a connection to the Excel file as you would to any database. The one wrinkle is selecting a data source.

As you'll recall, when you're creating a connection to an Access database, you must select a table name as your data source. Since Excel is a simple spreadsheet application, it has no tables. So, prior to creating the connection, you need to do a little tweaking in Excel. You should create a "named range" within your spreadsheet, which you can then point to in FrontPage. To do so, first open your spreadsheet in Excel and select all the data you want to include in your Results page. Then select Insert » Name » Define, type in a name and click OK.

Now you're ready to create the connection. To do so, follow the instructions on Adding a Database Connection. Make sure you let FrontPage know that the database file type is Microsoft Excel Driver (*.xls). Later, when you complete the Database Results Wizard and FrontPage asks you to specify a data source, select the named range you set up earlier.