Introducing two tools, html2wiki is a website that can convert HTML content into WIKI Markup, while WIKI2xHTML is a program that converts WIKI files into HTML.

If you aren’t quite familiar with them, Wikis are applications for presenting and storing information that allow different people to edit and change the content (the most famous example being Wikipedia). For more definitions on the web go here.

Since starting Freewaregenius I have come across a number of freeware WIKI note-taking programs (namely WikidPad and BladeWiki) which caught my attention. These seemed like excellent tools but, although I was interested, I was not able to properly use them because I never could quite come to grips with the syntax used for noting down information in a Wiki.

I recently had to become familiar with this Wiki syntax, however, after we decided to use a Wiki at work in order to document a project that I am working on with a team. And although in most respects Wiki syntax is pretty simple, I found that transferring tables full of data from, say, Excel into the Wiki was somewhat inconvenient to say the least.

• html2wiki: If you are using a Wiki and have content in HTML format that you want to transfer to a Wiki, html2wiki is a website that allows you to either point to a URL or paste HTML code into a web form and it will spit out your content in Wiki Markup. I had mixed results with this one when I tested it, as I found that when saving spreadsheets as html in Excel and pasting that into html2wiki they turned out somewhat garbled and required a lot of manual intervention. However, given that this is a development version (0.62) I will give this tool the benefit of the doubt and I trust it will be honed with time.

• WIKI2xHTML: is an open source program that can load Wiki files and convert them to HTML. This is a no install JAVA program that works really well, and will even give you a number of style/template options for the output page. Note that it will assume that any files or images that are pointed to in the Wiki Markup are in the destination directory that you set. Requires JAVA installed on your machine (see the readme for more info).

Visit the html2wiki page; or to download WIKI2xHTML do to the program home page (approx 1.48 megs).