I work with a State agency in Oklahoma. I wear about 15 different hats. One of the hats is to create and maintain our website. It is not a great website but it gets the basic information out to the licensees and the general public. I am very new at working with websites. The state agency that I currently work for uses "Works" (believe it or not) as their database. Everytime I want to take the information from the database I have to save it to text then move it to Excel and then save in a html to use on our website.

I like Excel and would like to start keeping the database in Excel all the time. Is it a good idea or is there another easy to use database for beginners?

Please help with this, once I have created the information from Excel and saved as an html, how do I make the information more printable for the end user? You can go to www.obespa.state.ok.us and go to the database to see what it looks like. It is pretty large. I want people to be able to be able to print it on regular 8x10 or 11x14 paper.

Please help, I am responsible to make this work on the web. Thanks

Welcome.

From what I saw of the web site and the two databases listed, Excel would work fine.

What version of Excel are you using? Keep in mind that some formatting will not be saved when you save as html; that might affect your ability to provide absolute printing control through the web site.

Excel from Office 2000. What can I do to make more printable?

Hi Jeanie,

It´s always difficult when we are beginners but Excel is one good option to start with.

As shades pointed out that saving sheets to HTML-format will also mean You loose some of the formatting.

Q1: What tool do You use to create the HTML-pages with at the moment?

Q2: Are You familiar with CSS, i e Cascade Style sheets?

Here I suppose that the we have the situation where the information is available at Your site and that You want the users to print it out in a friendly way.

Controling printing from web-pages is per se not an Excel-issue and it only refers to the browser the users use and the code behind the pages. However, following article discuss how to control printing from webpages:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/de...dhtmlprint.asp

I notice that the pages at the site are relative wide which I believe make it difficult to print them in a user-friendly way.

Alternative You may consider to make the workbook(s) available for download (just downloading them or by automatically star Excel on the users computers and then open the files in Excel).

In that way You leave it to the user how to handle it. The drawback is that the users must have Excel installed or at least have the Excel viewer installed.

I hope the above make at least some sense to You.

Kind regards,
Dennis

PS. If You have asked the question in the Access-forum the solution would be based on Access and if You have raised the question in the MySQL-forum then the solution would be based on MySQL.