Using Paste Special

New to Dreamweaver 8, the Paste Special command in the Edit menu gives you a variety of options that control the way formatted content is pasted into Dreamweaver's Design view.

You will probably use the Paste Special command most often when pasting in text from Microsoft Word or Excel, in order to maintain the formatting that the text had in those programs ( Figure 4.4 ). Text pasted in from Excel can appear in Dreamweaver as a formatted table, which saves you a lot of time and effort.

Figure 4.4. Paste Special does a great job of maintaining the formatting from Microsoft Word documents.

The Paste Special options are:

• Text only pastes just the text; paragraph marks and all formatting are stripped from the text ( Figure 4.5 ).

  Figure 4.5. This is the "Text only" version of the text from Figure 4.4, with paragraph marks and formatting stripped out.

  

• Text with structure pastes the text and maintains the structure (notably paragraphs tabs, and lists), but eliminates other text formatting ( Figure 4.6 ).

  Figure 4.6. With the "Text with structure option," the text in paragraph marks are there, but there's no character formatting.

  

• Text with structure plus basic formatting keeps the text and text structure, and keeps bold and italic formatting ( Figure 4.7 ).

  Figure 4.7. The "Text with structure plus basic formatting" option maintains bold and italic formatting.

  

• Text with structure plus full formatting preserves the text, structure, and styles from the original document ( Figure 4.8 ).

Figure 4.8. The final option, "Text with structure plus full formatting," maintains all the formatting from the Word document.

To use Paste Special:

1.	Select the text you want to cut or copy. The text will usually be in a different application than Dreamweaver.
2.	Cut or copy the text.
3.	Switch to Dreamweaver, and click to set the insertion point where you want the text to appear.
4.	Choose Edit > Paste Special, or press Ctrl-Shift-V (Cmd-Shift-V). The Paste Special dialog appears ( Figure 4.9 ). Figure 4.9. Choose the option that you want from the Paste Special dialog.
5.	In the dialog, click the radio button next to the paste option you want.
6.	Click OK. The text pastes in according to the option you selected.

Tips

• If you use the "Text with structure plus basic formatting" or "Text with structure plus full formatting" choices, you can also paste graphics into Dreamweaver along with the formatted text.

• You can copy and paste graphics from most applications into Dreamweaver, but if you want to paste a graphic along with formatted text, you must use Paste Special.