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2.2 Copying and Pasting Text

If you're building Web sites as part of a team or for clients, your writers are likely to
send you their copy in the form of word-processing documents. If the text comes in
a Microsoft Word document or Excel spreadsheet, you're lucky. Dreamweaver MX
2004 includes new commands for pasting text from these two types of files. If you're
using Windows, you can even import those kinds of files directly into a Web page
using FileImportWord/Excel Document (see Section 2.4).

2.2.1 Simple Copy and Paste

For non-Microsoft-spawned text, you can, of course, still simply copy and paste like
generations of Web designers before you.

Open the document in whatever program created itWordPerfect, AppleWorks,
your email program, or whatever. Select the text you want (by dragging through
it, for example), or choose EditSelect All (Ctrl+A [-A]) to highlight all text in
the document. Then choose EditCopy, or press Ctrl+C (-C), to copy it. Switch
to Dreamweaver, click in the document window where you wish the text to go, and
choose EditPaste (Ctrl+V [-V]).

When you copy from any
program other than Microsoft
Word or Excel, as shown at top,
and paste into Dreamweaver, as
shown at bottom, all formatting
is lost, and paragraph breaks are
replaced by line breaks. The little
icon that appears at the end of
the first line at right represents the
invisible line break.

This routine pastes the text into place. Unfortunately, you lose all text formatting (font
type, size, color, bold, italic, and so on) in the process, as shown in Figure 2-3.

Furthermore, you may find that pasted paragraphs are separated by line break characters,
not standard carriage returns. Strangely enough, this means that when you
paste in a series of paragraphs, Dreamweaver treats them as though they were one
gargantuan paragraph. These line break characters can pose problems when trying
to format what you think is a single paragraph. To identify these line breaks, see the
note in Section 2.1.1.1.

2.2.2 Pasting Text from Word: The Basic Method

One of the most frustrating things about earlier versions of Dreamweaver was their
inability to maintain basic formatting, like bold and italics, when copying and pasting
from Microsoft Word. Worse, even simple paragraphs would sometimes be merged
into a single glob.

But no more! Dreamweaver MX 2004 now includes both basic and advanced methods
of copying and pasting Word text. You can even paste spreadsheet information from
Excel, complete with rows, columns, and cells.

Frequently, you'll just want to preserve basic formatting like bold or italic text,
headlines, and bulleted lists. You won't need (and in most cases, won't want) more
extravagant formatting like different fonts, colors, or margin settings. After all, you're
the Web designer, and you'll use your own design senseand Dreamweaver's CSSbased
formatting toolsto add beauty to basic text.

Pasting Word text works like any copy/paste action described in the previous section.
Just select the text in Word, copy it, switch to Dreamweaver, and then choose Edit
Paste to drop it into a Web page. You don't have to spend a lot of time reformatting
the pasted text (see Figure 2-4), since many basic formatting options are preserved:

Any paragraphs formatted with Word's built-in Heading styles (Heading 1, Heading
2, and so on) get the HTML heading tags<h1> (or heading 1), <h2>, <h3>,
and so on.

Paragraphs remain paragraphs. This may seem like a simple thing, but previous
versions of Dreamweaver usually turned multiple paragraphs into one large paragraph
containing multiple line break characters.

Bold and italic text maintains its look in Dreamweaver. (The actual HTML tags,
however, can vary, as described in Section 3.3.2.)

Basic alignment options (left, right, and center) remain intact. Justified text, on
the other hand, gets pasted as left-aligned text. (You can compensate for this
small oversight by using the justified alignment option on the Property inspector,
described in Section 3.1.4.)

Numbered lists come through as numbered lists in Dreamweaver (see Section 3.2) if
you used Word's automatic numbered-list feature to create them.

If you use Word's built-in list-bulleting feature, you end up with a proper, HTML
bulleted list (see Section 3.2). However, if the bulleted list includes custom bullets
like check marks or clown faces, Dreamweaverfor whatever bizarre reasoninterprets
the list as basic paragraphs preceded by bullet characters. That is, you
don't wind up with the proper HTML for a bulleted list (which involves the <ul>
tag)you just get plain paragraphs preceded by a bullet text character. This bullet
might get deleted, ruining the look of the list, but even worse, you can't then take
advantage of CSS's list-formatting properties to change this bullet into a square,
hollow circle, or even little graphics.

Graphics from Word documents get pasted as graphics. In fact, even if the original
graphics aren't in a Web-ready format (if they're BMP, TIFF, or PICT files, for example)
Dreamweaver converts them to either the GIF or JPEG formats understood
by Web browsers. Dreamweaver even copies the files to your local site root and
links them correctly to the page. (Chapter 5 covers images in depth.)

NOTE

There are a couple of caveats with this feature. First, you can't copy and paste more than 300 K
worth of text, so you have to transfer really long documents in pieces (or better yet, spread them out among
multiple Web pages). And second, this feature only works with versions of Word later than Office 97 (for
Windows) or Office 98 (for Mac).

Dreamweaver MX 2004
now lets you paste Word
text (and graphics)like the
contents of the Word file at
topinto a Web page while
preserving basic formatting
options like headlines,
italics, paragraphs, and
bold (bottom left). The
Paste Formatted command
lets you preserve more advanced
formatting such as
font faces, colors, sizes, and
margins (bottom right). But
this special treatment comes
at a price: the file size of the
page on the right is about
10 percent larger than the
one on the left.

2.2.3 Pasting Text with Word Formatting

If you simply must keep that three-inch tall, orange text and crazy cartoon-like font,
you can turn to another new Dreamweaver MX 2004 featurePaste Formatted.

After copying text from Word and returning to Dreamweaver, choose EditPaste
Formatted, or press Ctrl+Shift+V (-Shift-V). Dreamweaver pastes the text with as
much formatting as possible, including margins, fonts, and text colors and sizes (see
Figure 2-4). Behind the scenes, Dreamweaver pastes the text and adds Cascading Style
Sheet codes that attempt to approximate the look of the text in Word.

Unfortunately, all of this extra code increases the document's file size and download
time and can interfere with future formatting changes. What's worse, most of your
visitors won't even be able to see some of this formattingsuch as uncommon font
faces. For these reasons, use this feature with caution.

2.2.4 Pasting Excel Spreadsheet Information

Dreamweaver MX 2004 offers two methods of pasting information from Microsoft
Excel, too: a basic method, using the standard Ctrl+V (-V) or EditPaste; and a
format-rich method, using Shift+Ctrl+V (Shift--V) or EditPaste Formatted. Both
methods paste spreadsheet information as an HTML table composed of cells, rows,
and columns (see Chapter 7 for more on tables).

But unlike pasting from Word, the basic Paste command from Excel preserves no
formatting: it doesn't even hang on to bold and italics.

The Paste Formatted command, however, preserves advanced formatting like font,
font size, text color, and cell background colors.

Strangely, though, this command only retains formatting applied to an entire cell in
Excel. If you use Paste Formatted on an entire cell of bolded text"UFO Sightings
Since 1996"the text does remain bold. But if you've included a combination of
plain and italicized text in one cell"Ad Sales Data for The National Exasperater,"
for examplenone of the italicized text will appear italicized in Dreamweaver. Kind
of confusing? It certainly is, so you'll need to closely check any Excel data you paste
into a Dreamweaver document. It may require some fine-tuning to make it look just
right.

NOTE

To make matters worse, even if you just use your basic EditPaste to get Excel data into Dreamweaver,
you frequently end up with useless CSS code (class attributes, to be specific) applied to most cells in the
table. For example, you can end up with HTML code like this: <td class="xl33">. (All this CSS is explained
fully in Chapter 6.)

2.2.5 Importing Word and Excel Documents (Windows)

Windows fans can also import material directly from a Word or Excel file into any
Dreamweaver document. Just place the cursor where you wish to insert the text or spreadsheet, and then choose FileImportWord Document (or Excel Document).
An Open file dialog box appears; find and double-click the Word or Excel document
you wish to import.

Dreamweaver captures the information just as if you'd used the EditPaste. That is,
for Word documents, Dreamweaver carries over basic formatting like bold, italics,
headlines, and paragraphs, and imports and converts images. The importing process
doesn't create style sheets or apply advanced formatting. For Excel documents, you
get just an organized table of datano formatting.