I'm looking for fast, robust software to batch-convert MS Word and MS
Excel documents to HTML.

My requirements:
- Good-looking, legible HTML output
- Conversion can be performed on Windows or Unix/Linux
- I can't use real copies of Word and Excel to perform the
transformation (many products require this)
- I can't spend huge bucks on Outside-In Server.
- No hacking or scripting can be required on my part - I'm looking for
a real product that does this.

Find me the product I need! Thanks!

I would recommend www.clicktoconvert.com.

From their website:

Click to Convert provides a quick, easy and affordable way to create
and share PDF or HTML files from virtually any document or
application.  Click to Convert allows businesses or users to easily
create high-quality screen/web optimized PDF or HTML by dragging and
dropping groups of files, by printing any file to Click to Convert?s
virtual printer or by using the toolbar button added to Microsoft
Office.
 
What Click to Convert does for you:

Batch-publishing mode - publish entire folders of documents to PDF or
HTML simultaneously.
PDF or HTML - create high-quality screen/web optimized PDF and HTML
from your documents without Adobe Acrobat.
MS Office toolbar integration - supporting hyperlinks, bookmarks and
table of contents.
PDF configuration - including 128bit security, compression, watermarks
and font embedding.
Font embedding - ensures PDFs look 100% like the original documents. 
Send - one-click e-mailing or uploading of files. 
Affordable - low cost per seat including multi-license and educational discounts. 
 
I believe the cost is around US$90 but the time and effort saved it is
well worth it.  You can also download a free trial version of the
software.

As an alternative (more expensive solution) you may wish to try out this company:
http://www.softinterface.com/Convert-Doc/Convert-Doc.htm
http://www.softinterface.com/Convert-XLS/Convert-XLS.htm

I have also found a number of other solutions which I can post the
links for but they tend to be more in the $500+ category!

---

Clarification of Answer by palitoy-ga on 18 May 2004 09:28 PDT

I searched magazines and the internet for you for 2 hours but from the
program that fitted your question the best seemed to be
ClickToConvert.  As you stated you "can't spend huge bucks" I didn't
put all my research there as as I stated it yielded solutions that
were $500+.

From the information on their site it states that you DO NOT need Word
or Excel installed:
http://www.clicktoconvert.com/HelpDesk/issue_view.asp?ID=55

I'm sorry you rated my answer so lowly and didn't like my suggestion
but I still believe ClickToConvert matches your requirements.

It looks like Click-To-Convert is basically a glorified printer driver
- you still need to have a copy of MS Word to convert word files, MS
Excel to convert Excel, etc. (That just cost me 30 minutes of research
that I was trying to avoid.) SoftInterface's products may be more
suitable, albeit quite expensive.

To convert a MS word document u can use the folowing method

Choose 'save as' command from file menu.then chage file type 'doc' to
"web page".then click save.

thus the word file will be saved as a HTML document and u can open it
by clicking on it and will open in a internet explorer window.

take care
satheesh

OpenOffice

Thanks for the comment - but I'll repeat that one of my requirements
is not using real MS Office applications.

To  palitoy-ga:

Trust me, I did install their demo, and it is just a print driver. If
you can't launch Word, you can't print. The "system requirements" page
is misleading. If you look at their "pro" (multi-thousand dollar
version), it's clearer:

http://www.purepage.com/Server/Requirements/requirements.html

I'm genuinely grateful for your efforts, and I don't fault you for
their misleading text, but in the end I'm paying for results I can
use. And I can't use ClickToConvert.

Would you be able to use the open-source alternative to MS Word ie
openoffice.org ? It might require scripting to handle batch convert,
but I'd be surprised if nobody's done this before.

Owain

Sorry, I hadn't seen diegoz' suggestion of openoffice before I added
my comment, but perhaps you didn't realise that it's NOT an MS Office
product (and it runs on Linux and Solaris too)

Owain

And I've found a conversion utility for OpenOffice.org ...
http://www.ooomacros.org/user.php#95532
DocConverter is a utility to convert a batch of documents from any
supported OOo format into any other supported OOo format. It could,
for example, be used to convert a batch of OOo Writer documents into
PDFs. Simple to use, with an interface similar to OOo's AutoPilots.

Owain

Been watching this, and I would recommend something to do with
openoffice as the closest possibility. The HTML it produces is a bit
outdated, but still much, much clearer than what you get from MS
Office. It's multi-platform, and can be automated to do batch
conversions. It does bring with it a fair bit of bloat, unfortunately.
Good luck, and sorry about your unusable answer.