Windows 7 / Getting Started

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Saving Web Pages

Occasionally, you might want to save a Web page on your computer's hard disk. For example, if it's a lengthy document that you want to be able to refer to offline, saving a copy would make sense. If you want to be able to work with the material in a program such as Microsoft Word, it would definitely make sense to save a copy of the page to your own computer first. Or perhaps you want to save a copy of an online receipt or airline boarding pass. To save a copy of the Web page you're currently viewing:

Tip A good alternative for saving receipts and boarding passes is to print them to a PDF or XPS file.

1. Choose File → Save As from Internet Explorer's menu. The Save Webpage dialog box opens.
2. Use the Favorite Links, Folders List, or address bar to navigate to the folder in which you want to save the page. If you don't have a preference, just choose Documents from the Favorite Links pane to put it in your Documents folder.
3. Optionally, change the page's name using the File name option. To improve searching later, consider naming the file so that it contains words you'd likely search for.
4. Optionally, choose a Save As type from one of these options:
   • Web Archive, Single File (*.mht): Stores the entire page, with pictures, in a single file with a single icon.
   • Web Page, Complete (*.htm,*.html): The entire Web page with all pictures is downloaded. You end up with two icons, one for the HTML page and the other for a folder containing pictures and perhaps other miscellaneous code files.
   • Web Page, HTML Only (*htm,*.html): Saves all the text and HTML of the page, but no pictures.
   • Text File (*.txt): Saves only the text of the page, no pictures or HTML tags.
5. Optionally, change the Encoding option, but only if you have a good reason, such as when saving non-English pages.
6. Click the Save button.

The page is saved to whatever folder you specified in Step 2. When you open that folder, you see one or two documents for the page. If you chose the Web Page, Complete option, you see two icons. One will be a document icon with whatever filename you entered in Step 3. The other icon will be a folder that has the same filename followed by _files.

To view the saved page offline, double-click the document icon (the one on the left). Or if you have multiple programs that are capable of opening HTML documents, right-click the document icon, choose Open With, and click the name of the program you want to use.

The _files folder contains pictures and other non-HTML page elements. Those extra items are required because the document file doesn't actually contain pictures or other elements. They only appear to be in the page when you open the page with your Web browser.

Note To see what's really in the Web page, right-click the document icon and choose Open With → Notepad. If you're not familiar with HTML, it will look like a bunch of nonsense. But you will notice that there no pictures when you view the document in Notepad.

In a sense, the document file and folder are joined at the hip. If you delete one, you automatically delete the other. But the reverse isn't true. If you decide to fish them out of the Recycle Bin, you need to restore each one individually.

If you chose the Web Page, HTML Only option, you get a document icon similar to the one on the right. But you don't get the folder icon. When you open that document, you see all the formatted text, but no pictures.

If you chose the Web Archive, Single File option. That one contains text and pictures. You can double-click it to open it in your Web browser. Or right-click it, choose Open With, and then choose the program you want to use.

If you saved the page as a text document, it will show a blank page icon rather than an Internet Explorer page icon. Because that's a plain text document, it contains only unformatted text, no pictures. When double-clicked, it will likely open in a simple text editor such as Notepad. Optionally, you could right-click its icon, choose Open With, and then choose a word processing program such as Microsoft Word. Then format the document using the features and capabilities of that word processing program.