[Sigia-l] Word Docs, Spreadsheets & PDFs Opening in Browser Windows

[George Olsen]

One things that's critical to point out is that automated
Word/Quark/Excel/PDF/etc. to HTML solutions try to replicate the document
_as it appears in print_.

If you are trying to make these pages look consistent with the rest of your
site, this will be a real problem. You then end up having to transform or
recreate the documents -- and that can be extremely time-consuming, since
either it means building software to do the transformation or having people
do it by hand. I'm working on a project where this can take anywhere from
30-45 minutes per document. Not good...

For the reasons Andrew mentions, I'd generally stick to PDF versions on a
public site, although for intranets and extranets, other common formats
such as Word and Excel are acceptable.

PDFs are difficult to integrate into navigation, so it's often better to
build HTML pages that are used for navigation with links to download the
PDFs. And if you've got large PDFs these HTML pages can also be used to
provide thing like a summary description, size of the download, etc. so
user can guess whether it's worth downloading.

If it's critical to navigate among PDFs, I'd suggest using frames with a
small header bar that contains the navigation, for example, using a pull-
down menu to switch among related PDFs at the same level and a link(s) to
change levels. But of course that's got all the issues that using frames
introduces.

_____________________________________________________________________
George Olsen                           george at interactionbydesign.com
User Experience Architect                                310-993-0467