Publisher & MSIE 8.0

[William Finck]

All three of my websites are generic MS-Publisher generated from standard
template components. All also appear and operate without any problems in IE
7,0, IE 6.0, Firefox, Google Chrome, and even on an old Win98 laptop I have
running IE 4. Yet using IE 8, all of my websites' navigation bars disappear,
and are nowhere to be found! IE 8 is not displaying any navigation bars from
any page on my sites! This happens whether I test the pages locally or view
them from the web. An example can be found at a personal site I am setting
up, at http://williamfinck.net/ , if anyone wants to check out this
phenomenon. I cannot be the only person who is experiencing this problem!

 

[DavidF]

You aren't alone. IE8 is designed to render webpages in a more 'standards
code compliant' mode than any previous version. In general, many websites
built by many different programs including Publisher do not produce
'standards compliant code' and have 'compatibility' issues in IE8. If you
care to read more about the details of these general statements here are two
articles:

Reference: Release Notes for Internet Explorer 8: Compatibility issues with
websites:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/dd441788.aspx

Reference: MSDN IEBlog:Just The Facts: Recap of Compatibility View:
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2009/02/16/just-the-facts-recap-of-compatibility-view.aspx

Unfortunately this is the price of progress, but luckily the only
compatibility issues with Publisher 2003 and 2007 and IE8 RTW reported thus
far are problems associated with 'grouping'. Any design elements that are
'grouped' together, which includes the Publisher wizard built navbars, do
not render when you view the web page in IE8. The fix in general is to
ungroup the elements. I have found no problems with Publisher 2000 webs.
While I am hopeful that MSFT will soon provide a patch that will fix these
issues in at least Pub 2007, there is a *fix* you can use in the meantime.

In your case I would suggest that you open your original Publisher file and
go to File > Save As and save a copy of your Pub file under a different
name. Now working with the new copy of your Pub file go to Edit > Select All

Arrange > Ungroup. This will ungroup the text boxes and images that

compose the Publisher built navbars along with any other design elements
that might be grouped together on the page. Now the navbar and the rest of
the page should render correctly when you do a web page preview. Repeat this
with each page in your publication. 'Publish to the Web' from this copy of
your publication, upload those files and they will render correctly in IE8.
If you want to make changes in your web in the future go back to your
original Pub file, make the changes, save, and again do a 'Save As' to make
a copy, etc.

The reason I suggest making a copy of your original Pub file and doing the
'ungrouping' on that copy is that when you ungroup the navbar, you will also
ungroup it from the Publisher navbar wizard. This means that if you want to
add a page in the future the navbar will not be automatically updated and
that change propagated throughout the site.You would have to rebuild the
navbar under those circumstances or manually edit the old one.

If you don't plan on adding any more pages to your site in the near future,
then making a copy and doing the ungrouping on that copy in order to
preserve the navbar wizard would not be necessary. Furthermore you could
also do the ungrouping on the original Pub file, produce your new web pages,
and then close the original Pub file without saving the changes. I just
think that perhaps making a copy is a bit safer, but that is up to you.

While this *fix* is a bit of a pain, hopefully it will be temporary. If you
find any other compatibility issues with your pages and IE8, I would
appreciate it if you would post that information in the web group and tell
us what specifically isn't working, and provide a link to the page where we
can find it.

If you have a follow up question or other questions about Publisher webs,
then in the future please post in the web group and we will try to help you
there:
news://msnews.microsoft.com/microsoft.public.publisher.webdesign
or
http://www.microsoft.com/office/com...soft.public.publisher.webdesign&lang=en&cr=US

Please always include the version of Publisher you are using, the URL of
your site and as much detail as possible. Thanks.

DavidF

 

[William Finck]

David, thank you for taking the time to make such a long and useful
repsonse. I use Publisher because it is easy, because it helps to leverage an
investment I already have in MS-Office (2007), and because I would rather
concentrate on the more important content-provision side of my sites rather
than on coding. But I also must expect the products which Publisher produces
to be generally usable, and that is not a high expectation! I already know
that the page sizes are far too large for the content which they contain, yet
suffer that for the benefit of being able to create and update pages rather
quickly. My two main websites contain 9 & 10 pages each on the main
navigation bar alone, and they are updated several times each week. They
contain many other pages which also display the navigation bars. If I have
to go through the solution which you present each time I update my sites,
well, that could be even more time-consuming than simply migrating my site
construction to another, already "compliant" product. If Microsoft does not
patch Publisher 2007 soon in order to repair this, I will have to do just
that, and in the meantime hope that not too many users switch to IE 8! For
this is not a minor problem for Publisher, from my point-of-view. They
should have been addressing this while IE 8 was in beta, or even alpha!

What I do marvel about, is that after all of these years in the business,
Microsoft still appears not to be communicating between departments
concerning such matters (I have used MS products from the days of MS-C 5 and
MS-Assembler on DOS 4.0!) and still does not seem to be addressing such
problems with their products BEFORE they are released. It would only seem
natural to me, that the Publisher development team would want to check out
their product as soon as an IE beta hit distro, and be moving to rectify any
problems before time - while also letting the user community know what is
going on! I can't afford to wait too long for a patch to drop out of the
cloud.

Thank You!
William Finck

 

[DavidF]

First of all I apologize to the group for continuing this slightly OT thread
in this group. However, given the nature of this issue with IE8 and
Publisher webs I think it needs some extra exposure at this point. There are
a lot of static Publisher webs out there and their builders aren't even
aware of this problem with IE8. I promise to move these Publisher web
conversations to the web group in the future <grin>.

William, I would tend to agree with you. I suspect that there are marketing
forces within MSFT that result in products being rushed to the market before
they are as fully developed and debugged as they should be, or before other
product groups have had time to test and fix their product compatibility.
Perhaps that is the case with IE8, with MSFT fast loosing market share to
FireFox and other browsers, I am sure there was a lot of pressure to get the
new version out there. But in their defense I would also say that at least
they seem to be moving in a good direction away from nonstandards compliant
html code. First they dropped or replaced FrontPage with Web Expression
which is designed to produce more standards compliant code, and now they are
changing their browser to also be more standards compliant. In the long run
this is probably a good strategy. In the short term it is creating a lot of
problems for lots of people using lots of different programs to produce
their sites. I also wish that MSFT had worked out a patch for Publisher
prior to releasing IE8 and I appreciate your sentiments about needing a
quick fix or needing to move on to another program. You are also correct
that it is not a minor problem and I hope MSFT addresses it quickly, as any
workaround is a hassle and shouldn't be necessary.

I can see how the workflow I suggested would not work well for you with you
updating your sites weekly. I do have a couple suggestions. First of all
since you are so experienced working with your publications, you could
consider making your weekly edits and updates, and *save those changes*.
Then instead of making a second copy perhaps you could skip making the extra
copy and after you have ungrouped each page and 'Publish to the web' then
*close your publication without saving the changes*. I wouldn't recommend
this to less experienced people but it would save you at least one step.
Also if you prefer to work from the key board go to your first page > CTRL +
A (select all) > CTRL + Shift + G (ungroup). Then CTRL + G (go to page) >
key the next page number > Enter, and repeat CTRL + A > CTRL + CTRL + G. You
might be able to move through your publication pretty fast without using the
mouse at all.

Since it sounds like most of your site is probably fairly static, I would
also suggest that you look at the possibility of ungrouping the wizard built
navbars permanently. How often do you add pages? You could move to a
manually built navbar whether textual or using images. I actually abandoned
the wizard built navbar many years ago and import a javascript based navbar
to each page from a directory/folder on my webhost server. If I want to
change the navbar across my site, I just upload the new javascript to that
folder and the change is automatically propagated throughout my site. My
point is, you do have some alternatives here.

You can keep the same look of your current navbar in an ungrouped navbar, if
you want. If you ungroup a wizard built navbar you will notice that it is
made up of several design elements. There will be images or autoshapes and a
text box, plus another 'hot spot hyperlink box' on top of the text box. You
can always insert a hyperlink the normal way and end up with underlined text
or create a hotspot link on top of the text box as the wizard does. You will
find the hotspot link feature on the left of your Pub work area, a small
green ball icon with a hashed mark square around it. Click it, go to one
corner of your text box and draw a rectangle the same size as the text box,
and insert the link to another page. What I am saying is that you can create
a new navbar button pretty easily manually. Or if you want to insert a new
page, you can opt to add the original navbar plus the new page button during
the Insert > Page process. Publisher will make the button for you, but you
would have to ungroup that navbar and copy and paste the new button to the
other page ungrouped navbars.

Another idea for you to consider... It sounds like much of your site is
static, and that your updates only affect a few pages. If so, have you
considered building your site with multiple Publisher files? You would build
the static part of your site with one Publisher file, upload it, and be done
with it. Then build the other pages that change weekly with other Publisher
files. This way you only need make the needed changes for IE8 in most of
your site just once, and you also save the time involved in uploading the
whole site each time. I went this direction when my sites started getting
too big and cumbersome to upload them each time I made even a small change.
If you want to pursue this, post in the web group as it is really OT here.

Look, I agree that none of these workarounds should even be necessary, and
they all result in extra work for you. But unless you are ready to invest
both the money and the time learning another program, then you might as well
wait a while until we see if MSFT brings out a patch to fix this, or at
least tells us of what they plan on doing. FWIW it does sound like MSFT is
aware of this issue, so my goal here is just to offer some workarounds to
use in hopefully the short term. Just be aware that you will not be
successful importing your Pub web site into another program. The html code
is too different and unique to Publisher.You will need to rebuild it, and
chances are you will have to do some tweaking with whatever program you
choose in order to achieve cross browser compatibility. Fully standards
compliant code and cross browser compatibility is an ever moving target.
That is just the nature of web building, whatever program you use.

Good luck.

DavidF

 

[William Finck]

David,
Thank you for your very helpful and informative responses. I am sorry, I
did not realize that my posts here were so far off of the topic of the
thread. Although I've been around PCs and Microsoft for many years, I also
am just returning after a prolonged absence from computers altogether, so at
the same time I am a "newbie" at many things. I have been evaluating some
low-end html editors, being reluctant to make such a large investment in
something like Web Expression for only a couple of sites. By the way, I was
wondering what happened to Front Page, which I used all the time back in '95
& '96, so thank you for answering that question also! Ironically, everything
in my Publisher-generated webs will carry over except the navigation bars.
Your java-generated
navigation bars sound like a good idea, and I will pursue that route.
Thanks again!

 

[Craig]

DavidF,

Thank you so much for your post! It was a much needed easy fix for my
problem. To speak to the rather lengthy debate about the wisdom of using
Publisher for web development (at the risk of placing myself in the line of
fire), it is very much an academic discussion that from my perspective is a
moot point. Like myself, there are many of us out here with a need for a
simple, attractive, relatively professional, easy to maintain website, who
don't have the time (or perhaps the chops) to learn a more complicated tool,
and don't have the funds to invest in new software to accomplish our goal.
The fact is that we are going to do the best we can manage with the tools
that are already at our disposal, and hope that we can find people like you
to help us along when we get stuck, or when Microsoft changes the game a
little bit. So it doesn't really matter if it is the best tool for the job,
we are stuck with it, happy to have it, and appreciative of the shared
knowledge that helps us use it.

For your willingness to help, I thank you.

Craig

 

[DavidF]

Craig,

Thank you for your words and the feedback. You made my day.

DavidF

 

[Donnarosie]

THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU!

Apparently Microsoft Tech Support is clueless. After a frustrating hour on
the phone with them, I decided to just type my question into the search box
on the Microsoft main page. Thank goodness I found this discussion.
Ungrouping the objects solved the problem! You think Microsoft would have
updated their Explorer and Publisher tech support people with this
information.

 

[DavidF]

Thank you for posting. It is always good to hear when information helps one
person, and now this thread has helped three...

This issue is actually now documented by MSFT. See:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/969705

It also sounds like there *may* be a permanent fix for Pub 2007 at least,
coming with the Office 2007 SP2 due out by the end of March.

If you have a follow up question or other questions about Publisher webs,
then please post in the web group and we will try to help you there:
news://msnews.microsoft.com/microsoft.public.publisher.webdesign
or
http://www.microsoft.com/office/com...soft.public.publisher.webdesign&lang=en&cr=US

DavidF

 

[Joe]

I had the same problem and similar concerns that William did. I implemented
your fix in about 1 minute and problem solved! Thanks! Much appreciated. I
went about 2 weeks with this problem hanging because I figured it would take
a while to figure a work around or that I might have to buy new software.
What a load off my mind, Thanks again!

 

[SteveB]

Is microsoft changing Publisher accordingly. I have spent 2 hours tinkering
with "ungrouping" and re-configuring. very un-appealing.

 

[DavidF]

The only compatibility issues with Publisher 2003 and 2007 webs and IE8 RTW
reported thus far are problems associated with 'grouping'. Any design
elements that are 'grouped' together, which includes the Publisher wizard
built navbars, do not render when you view the web page in IE8 . The fix in
general is to ungroup the elements.

You must have a huge site as it could not take more than 10 to 20 seconds to
go to each page Edit > Select All (or Ctrl+A), and then Arrange > Ungroup
( or Ctrl+Shift+G). This is still the manual method you will have to use for
Publisher 2003.

Though you can use the manual method of ungrouping the navbars, MSFT also
fixed the issue for Pub 2007 users with the Office 2007 SP2: Reference:
Description of 2007 Microsoft Office Suite Service Pack 2 (SP2) and of
Microsoft Office Language Pack 2007 SP2:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=953195

Some users found that SP2 'broke' Publisher and they were unable to open
existing Pub files. That too has been fixed with a hotfix:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/972566/
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/972632

If you are having a different problem or the solutions provided do not work
for you, then please post your follow up questions in the web design group
and we will try to help you there.

news://msnews.microsoft.com/microsoft.public.publisher.webdesign
or
http://www.microsoft.com/office/com...soft.public.publisher.webdesign&lang=en&cr=US

Please always include the version of Publisher you are using, the URL of
your site and as much detail as possible.

DavidF

 

[SteveB]

the fix you suggest only ungroups one page at a time. My sebsite is 50
pages, way too difficult. Is MS planning a fix?

 

[DavidF]

10 seconds per page is too difficult?

DavidF

the fix you suggest only ungroups one page at a time. My sebsite is 50
pages, way too difficult. Is MS planning a fix?