Excel provides two primary means of publishing documents on-line:
You will examine each of these in turn and discuss the accessibility issues each method raises.
The easiest method of publishing Excel documents to the Web is to upload them to the Web site from which you want them visible. Once the document is on-line, you can create a selectable link which will either download the document to one's computer or will open it within the web browser.
The principle problem with this approach is that if the user does not have the right version of the Microsoft Excel program or Microsoft Excel Viewer loaded onto their computer, then the document is completely "invisible" and cannot be opened at all. All of the content is hidden from the user, and it is completely inaccessible.
You must ensure that your users have the right version of the Excel program correctly installed or provide an alternate format for the document.
Even if you are certain that all of your viewers have Excel installed, you must also consider download time. Excel documents in their native format (xls files) can be quite large, and as you will see later in this module, the same information formatted as an accessible web page (html) is much quicker to open and view.
The next page will discuss an alternative format: saving the spreadsheet as a Web page.
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