Microsoft office (including Word 2007)

Microsoft Office (Including Word 2007)

When Bill Gates realized that Microsoft was lagging on the Internet front, the

word went out to integrate Web support into every product. As a result, you

can save Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, and PowerPoint slides as

Web pages.

Many companies use the Office suite to place information on their intranet

because most employees are comfortable in Word and Excel. These tools are

quite adequate for creating static Web content that some call brochure ware.

Although somewhat bloated, the pages are faithful reproductions of the

original document — especially when viewed in Microsoft’s latest Internet

Explorer browser.

There’s nothing to stop you from using a “saved-as HTML” page in an ASP.NET

site. However, you may find that removing the unwanted HTML markup takes

more time than building the page from scratch.

Expression Web

Expression Web took over from Microsoft FrontPage as the content editor for

professional designers. Although some see Expression as an advanced word

processor for HTML pages, it’s actually much more, thanks to many important

tools for Web designers. These tools include file management, link checking,

style editing, and drag-and-drop support for HTML and ASP.NET controls.

Expression Web inherited the excellent split-view editor from FrontPage

that lets you work in graphical and source code modes at the same time. The

feature is so well done that Microsoft yanked the HTML editor from Visual

Web Developer and substituted the superior Expression/FrontPage version.

Expression Blend

Expression Blend is mainly for the ponytail set (artistic types who prefer

Macs) to create vector-based, animated, and three-dimensional graphics —

much the way they do in Photoshop. Blend has a rich set of brushes, palettes,

paint buckets, text, gradients, timelines, and event triggers for those with

the skill to take advantage of them.

The XML-based files that Blend generates work in Windows Presentation

Foundation (WPF) applications that run on Windows and in cross-platform

Silverlight apps for the Web. (For more on Silverlight, see the section later

in this chapter

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