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Macromedia Dreamweaver - How To
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Tips & Tricks
- Broken Tables
Occasionally you will try to edit a page in Dreamweaver and find that it will appear in one web browser correctly and incorrectly in another. Usually these pages will involve tables. We can use Cell Padding or Cell Spacing since it sets the distance that cells are from each other. Adjusting Cell Spacing and Padding can be very tricky because adjusting either of those options will affect the entire table. To adjust Cell Spacing, place the cursor in the table, then from thee modify menu, select Table, and then click on the Select Table option. In the CellSpacing box, type in the number you want. Hit enter. To adjust Cell Padding, place the cursor in the cell. From the modify menu, select Table, then click Select Table. Under the CellPad box, type the number you want. And hit enter. When adjusting tables, you can adjust somethig that can affect the whole table entirely or affect only the cell you are working on. For example, if you want to align the entire table to the center of the page, you would adjust the alignment property of the entire table. If you wanted to align the text in a cell to the center of that cell, you would adjust the alignment property of that individual cell. Since table properties and cell properties are often called the same thing, it is important to pay attention to which property you want to adjust. On the other hand, you can also insert tables inside of an existing table.- Place the cursor in the cell of an existing table
- click on the Insert menu, select Table
- Complete the Table dialog box
- Click OK
The new table is inserted within the selected cell of the existing table. However, why make tables within tables when you could just make more cells? One possible solution to fixing broken tables is to use the Convert Tables to Layers command from the Layout Mode submenu of the Modify menu. Then, use the Convert Layers to Tables command, and chances are that any bugs in the table are fixed.
- Excel Spreadsheets
Many users use Microsoft Excel to store their data and later try to put it up on the web for others to use. There is a multi-part process to make this possible. First, open up the Excel spreadsheet that you want to convert in Excel. Now, use the Save As command in the File menu, and in the dialog that pops up, change the Save as Type to be "Text (tab delimited) *.txt" and save the file. Now, open up Dreamweaver and a file that you want to put the table into. Use the Import Table Data command in the File->Import menu, and in the import dialog change the Delimiter box to say "Tab" and select the file that you previously saved in Excel. Dreamweaver will import the file and put it into a table, and you may want to refer to the Broken Tables information above if the page does not look right in Netscape or Internet Explorer.
- Word Documents
Many people use Microsoft Word to write up their documents and later try to convert it to HTML using Word's built-in functions. However, most of the time the result is not very pretty to look at. Fortunately, Dreamweaver has a function Clean Up Word HTML in the Commands menu. Just open up the file you saved as HTML from Word and then run that command, and Dreamweaver will fix the document to appear correctly.
Bugs
In the production of a program of a scale as large as Dreamweaver, there are certain to be bugs and other glitches in the program that may make the program crash or mess up how your webpages are created.
If you have problems with Dreamweaver, your best bet for finding help on resolving the problem is Macromedia's Dreamweaver Support Site at http://www.macromedia.com/support/dreamweaver/. Here you will find updates to the documentation, information on solving Dreamweaver crashes, and file downloads to update behavior for Netscape 6 and fix bugs.
