Byrne Tony Byrne

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Let Google convert your Word docs

2-Jun-2006

Tags: Web Content and Experience Management, Implementation

Phil Windley points to Derrick Story, who noticed that GMail has a nifty capability to convert MS Word (and some other formats) to HTML, just like in Google search results. You simply mail a Word file to your GMail account, and then "View as HTML." The results aren't bad. HTML output is much smaller and cleaner than when Microsoft generates the HTML for you. The code is almost XHTML compliant, but one drawback: in lieu of clunky Microsoft styles, the Google output seems to have a tendency to apply <font> tags instead. And as always, you can do nasty things in Word that no converter will reasonably clean up. When I tried some sample docs I found some extra paragraph returns in the HTML. These stemmed from failing in Word to distinguish line-feeds (which convert to <br> -- note the absent trailing '/' -- hence almost compliant) from paragraph returns (convert to <p></p>). Still, as Windley suggests, it would be handy if Google or a partner could work out a business model for providing this as a service. Right now, most rich text editors will accept Word input (with the same usual requirement for some editorial clean-up), but it would be nice to have a standardized service, and who better than Google to provide it?

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