Many of us use MS Word to create our handouts, content and resources for instruction but when we move our content online it is not always the best way for students. Yes, this might be the easiest way for us but we need to consider that not all students have Microsoft Office at home. Many of them have MS Works which unfortunately doesn’t always work well with MS Word documents.
The issue we have run into lately is that if you save your Word file as an HTML file (WebPage) then if you look at the HTML editor in D2L it has added a lot of characters and things that should not be there. It also takes the efficiency out of the equation by doing this because you can no longer edit the file directly in D2L without messing up the content so you still have to download the file to edit.
When you create an HTML file from a Word file you will have some formatting issues at times especially if you use spaces instead of tabs or tables. The spaces will not transfer properly to HTML because it is an incorrect way to format (even in Word).
To deal with this issue, you can save your Word files as a Web Page but with a couple extra steps make the file editable too.
- Go to File – Save As.
- Select Web Page (*.htm; *.html) in the Save as type: drop-down box.
- You can change the title by select the Change Title button (this just gives the document a title that would be listed in D2L).
- Select the Tools button to the left and choose Web Options.
- Choose the Encoding tab.
- Select from the Save this document as: drop-down box Unicode ( UTF-8 )
- Click OK
Once you have saved the document as an HTML file then you can go into D2L and import the file in whatever tool you are using or directly into the Manage Files area. If you use this file in the Content tool you will be able to edit the file directly in the HTML editor if necessary.
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Tags: Content Creation, D2L, HTML
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