Save Data From The Web

You can save web pages, graphics, images, and text from the Internet to your computer for subsequent reuse in another document. There are several ways you can save data, described below:

  • Pages. You can save a web page through the “File / Save” or “File / Save As” menu items. You can then access the page by double-clicking on it, or by opening it through the “File / Open” menu item. The text and links will be saved, but the embedded graphics and other objects usually are not. You can also “Save As” the page in text format.
  • Graphics. You can save graphics by dragging them to the desktop with your mouse. You can also save images by clicking on them with the right mouse button (hold down the button on a Mac) and selecting “Save As”.
  • Text. You can select text and copy it with the mouse, unless the page has special settings that disallow it. If the text has a lot of spaces at the start of the lines when you copy it into a word processing document, you can replace them as follows in Microsoft Word.
    • Copy the paragraph mark from the end of one line and the spaces at the start of the next. Paste them into the “search for” field.
    • Put a single space in the “replace with” field. Select “replace all”.

The web makes it very easy to copy text, graphics, and even entire pages, but remember that most web pages are copyrighted either explicitly or by default under international copyright law. Therefore, you should always make sure you have the appropriate permission before you reuse data from the web.

Many sites explicitly or implicitly allow the copying of text and graphics for personal use, and for individual use in educational environments. If you do use someone else’s work with their permission, you should also provide an attribution and a link to their page.