Free Tool to Convert Microsoft Word Bullets to HTML
Word to HTML Lists
Free Download (36 KB)
Web designers and developers that fill their sites with content submitted to them in Microsoft Word format will really love this freeware utility from Sharp Hue. The simple program allows you to quickly take a bulleted list from Microsoft Word and convert it to the correct HTML format that browsers use to render bulleted lists.
While bulleted lists are a great way to organize information and Microsoft Word is a great tool to write content, very few people realize how cumbersome and time-consuming it actually is to convert the Word bulleted list to the correct HTML Lists version.
The main problem when copying and pasting bulleted lists from Word to most HTML editors like Dreamweaver, Visual Studio, and Notepad is that the actual bullet character and a tab are inserted before the list item as seen below. The only way to get rid of them is to move the cursor around and start deleting ... this can take forever!
Even after removing the bullet characters and tabs, one must apply the opening and closing list item HTML tag before and after each item. Even more work! The solution? A handy little tool we built at Sharp Hue to speed this process up: Word to HTML Lists.
The software is rather self explanatory and simple, but if you spend as much time as we do working content into client's web sites, you will be very excited to have a tool like this do all the work for you. As far as we know, such a tool does not exist anywhere else, so enjoy!
4 comments:
This is an awesome tool! Thanks a lot! I've been using it for several days and it's been incredibly handy.
I would like to make one suggestion to make the tool even better. In addition to cleaning up the other Word gunk, replace the "smartquotes" that Word uses with normal single and double quote marks.
After I cleaned my lists in your tool I encountered some weirdness and in some contexts my browser was barfing on the smartquote characters. I replaced them with normal quotes and it was no big deal, but such an enhancement would make your tool even better!
Matt, thanks for the great idea. I've modified the app to clean up the smartquotes inside of bullet items. To download the new version just click the download button in the blog posting again. Let me know if you have any issues with it.
I have hundreds of pages of MS Word to move to html and have spent literally hour after hour looking at programs to convert bulleted lists. I've even tried a high powered hex editor thinking I could 'get at' them that way.
This piece of code is just super - why don't you expand it to allow it to 1) read in a file 2) convert the bullets 3) convert the paragraphs 4) write it back out. And sell it!
sandyyoung@specialist-services.com
sandyyoung -- that is a great idea and we will definitely consider it!
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