Explore the different formats in which you can save data from Office applications

A few months ago I posted about [what I think is] a neat way of using Outlook's ability to save as HTML. Today when compiling a powerpoint presentation, it occurred to me that there are a lot of formats that Office applications can save into that I find useful, and it's worth highlighting a few more:

  • In Word, save as a “Single File Web Page (*.mht, *.mhtml)“, especially if you're uploading to a sharepoint or other shared location where others will be viewing the file, as IE can render the MHTs much quicker than it can load winword.exe to host a .doc (and without the annoying prompt). This keeps all graphics and text inline in a single file, versus saving as .htm which creates a 'thicket' (one .htm file and a subfolder with graphics/etc that are referenced from the .htm).
  • In Excel, save as .mht, and check the “Add interactivity“ checkbox, which will allow you to have a more dynamic spreadsheet-in-a-webpage with sorting capabilities
  • In Powerpoint, save a slide as a GIF, JPG, PNG or a few other graphical formats. This is useful if you want to do some significant modification to an image (for example, today I had a need to take a chart from a slide and make a large poster out of it, so I saved it as PNG and blew it up in photoshop and added a few things)
  • In Powerpoint, if you have a deck with mostly text in it, save it as .RTF to get an outline format that can be read by anyone with wordpad.
  • And of course, in many Office 2003 apps you can save as XML... And everyone already knows how awesome that is, right? : -)