Importing Spreadsheet Data

If you have text in a spreadsheet or even in a Microsoft Word table, you can easily insert that content into Dreamweaver documents. To do so, you need to save a document as a tab- or comma-delimited file to make it compatible with Dreamweaver. You can use tab- or comma-delimited files that have been created using a variety of programs, including Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word. In this exercise, the tab-delimited text file has already been created for you. You'll import the data into a new table, then transfer the data from the new table into the first table you created.

1.	With the insertion point on the new line that you created in the previous exercise in the index.html document, click the Tabular Data button in the Layout category on the Insert bar. Tip You can also choose Insert > Table Objects > Import Tabular Data to open the same dialog box. The Import Table Data dialog box opens.
2.	Click the Browse button to the right of the Data file text field and choose schedule.txt from the Lesson_06_Tables/Text folder. Leave Tab selected in the Delimiter menu. For Table width, choose Set to, type 500 in the text field, and choose Pixels from the menu. Leave both Cell padding and Cell spacing blank. You should leave Format top row set to (No Formatting), which is the default, and leave Border set to 1. Click OK when you are done.

Note

If Set is selected in the Table width section when you open the Import Tabular Data dialog box, the table width text field for specifying size and /or the measurement selection might be dimmed. If this happens, try switching to the Fit To Data option and then switch back to Set.

A table is built for you according to the options you just selected, and the data from the tab-delimited schedule.txt file that you are importing has been inserted into that new table.

Note

You can also use a variety of other delimiters, including semicolons and colons, but tabs and commas are the most widely used. Choosing Other from the Delimiter menu displays a text field in which you can type the delimiter of your choice.

When the second table is selected, the gray bar of the table header can overlap and obscure the lower portion of the first table. Click outside the tables and the table header will disappear.