Any Web developer who has tried to copy and paste content from a Microsoft Word table or Excel spreadsheet should truly appreciate what Macromedia has accomplished in Dreamweaver MX 2004. No more rebuilding tables from content that was originally created in Word or Excel (WooHoo!). Instead, tables can be copied and pasted directly from Excel and Word (see Figure 4.15), and Dreamweaver constructs a table with the appropriate dimensions.
Figure 4.15. Tables can now be copied and pasted directly from Word or Excel.
NOTE
Although it's great that Dreamweaver is now able to understand and accommodate the table structures used by Word and Excel, it's still a little early to expect too much out of the copy/paste relationship between Dreamweaver and Microsoft products. For instance, if you copy and paste a bulleted list from Word, Dreamweaver displays the list (bullets and all), but does not recode the content into an unordered list as it should be. Instead, you get content divided by paragraph breaks, using the Unicode character to symbolize the bullet. Although getting closer, the two applications still have a way to go before they are totally copy/paste compatible.
To learn why dynamic pages are much better than copying/pasting, see "Frequently Changing Content" in the "Troubleshooting" section at the end of this chapter, p. 70 .
