If your portfolio is going to be electronic and it's made with Word documents, spreadsheet files, PowerPoints, or any other program, viewers of your portfolio will have to have that program on their machines to view the documents. 

That's a potential problem.  Most people in business and education have MS Office on their machines, but you never can be totally sure. 

Word documents and other MS products will open in Internet Explorer, but not in other browsers like Netscape.

A solution is to take your portfolio documents (let's say Word files) and resave them all as web pages.  This is a good idea because it's a safe bet to say that the vast majority of people have a web browser on their computers. 

I'll walk you through the steps of saving your pages as web pages.  Let's assume that you saved them originally as Word documents and that you don't want to lose the original Word docs.

First, make a new folder to hold the web version of your portfolio.  Call it something like My Portfolio - Web Version.

Now open your Word documents, keeping track of what's been done.  When your Word document is open, go to File/Save As.  Word usually saves documents as Word files (da).

You can specify that it saves the page as a web page.  Once you save it as a web page, it will now open in any browser, not just Internet Explorer.  Make sure you save it into the new folder if you created one.

Open your browser and then open one of the files you just saved. 

Try printing one of your newly saved web pages:

Are there pictures or graphics in your files?

If there are, Word will make a folder to go along with your newly saved web file.  The folder is named in a similar fashion to the file, as in the picture here.  The folder holds any graphics that are on the page.