Microsoft Office saves text to HTML by using cascading style sheets (CSS) style attributes whenever possible.
All paragraphs are converted to the P element and all styles are mapped to CSS styles that are then attached to paragraphs with the class attribute.
Elements that cannot be covered by standard HTML CSS style attributes are covered by Microsoft Office specific attributes such as mso-style-parent, mso-pagination, mso-fareast-font-family, etc.
Hyphenation is covered by the mso-hyphenate attribute.
Paragraph alignment is covered by standard HTML alignment attributes.
Spacing above and below paragraphs is covered by margin-top and margin-bottom attributes.
Empty paragraphs are supported by checking whether the browser supports empty paragraphs. If it does not, a (non-breaking space) is inserted. Also, an empty set of o:p tags is inserted.
Hanging indents are created with the margin-left and text-indent attributes.
Line spacing is respresented by the line-height attribute for exact line spacing and by the mso-line-height-rule attribute for the "at least" property of Word with mso-line-height-alt for small line heights.
mso-pagination is used to store pagination properties.
Fonts are saved as part of the style. If a font is not on a particular machine, a similar font will be used.
Embedded fonts are saved using the @font-face attribute.
Font properties are mapped to HTML in the following way: Values include:
| Font Property | HTML Element |
| Bold | b |
| Italic | i |
| Underline (single) | u |
| Subscript | sub |
| Superscript | sup |
| Strikethrough | s or strike |
| Double strikethrough | s or strike |
| Color | font-color |
| Size | font-size |
| Language | lang |
| Character spacing | letter-spacing |
| Small caps | font-variant |
| All caps | text-transform |
| Highlight | background |
| Underline (in style) | text-decoration |
| Strikethrough (in style) | text-decoration |
| Text color | windowtext |
Tabs are represented by the mso-tab-count attribute.