This is the blog of Adam Kalsey. Unusual depth and complexity. Rich, full body with a hint of nutty earthiness.
This is the blog of Adam Kalsey. Unusual depth and complexity. Rich, full body with a hint of nutty earthiness.
20 Sep 2003
Finally I’ve found something that FrontPage is useful for. Clients often provide content for their sites in MS Word format. Sometimes the text includes tables of data. In order to get the text, tables and everything else into HTML, you have two choices. Copy the content and reformat it by hand, or save the document as a Web page and then copy the HTML.
If you save the documents as Web pages, you end up with a bunch of files that are only going to be used temporarily. What I’ve discovered is that if you copy the content from Word and paste it into FrontPage, all the formatting is retained. Then you can switch to the HTML view of the page and copy out the HTML.
You’ll still be stuck with all the MS Word bloated markup, but it’s relatively easy to remove those with some simple regex.
Sorry, forgot the URL: http://textism.com/resources/cleanwordhtml/
The new version of Dreamweaver (which completely rocks), has some kind of crazy support for importing content from Office documents.
http://www.macromedia.com/software/dreamweaver/productinfo/features/static_tour/files/index.html#02
You’re right Josh. The Word/Excel stuff was one of my favorite additions to Dreamweaver MX 04. Works really well. Now I don’t have to cringe every time a client goes Office crazy.
So now FrontPage is back to useless :)
I just grabbed a trial copy of Dreamweaver MX 04. The Office import feature works like a dream and is alone worth the price of the software.
If you use it, it’s easy to reformat a client’s copy in Word and then paste it into Dreamweaver. Going through and replacing double paragraph breaks and setting heading styles is easier if you do that part in Word and then copy the text into Dreamweaver.
Granted, FP is basically useless - but for those who don’t want to spring for the new MX suite (well worth it!!) an even easier way to get the data into FP without the copy/paste business, and yields slightly cleaner code is to use the Insert> File command. Change the file type to .doc, browse and voila!
Adam Kalsey
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Email: adam AT kalsey.com
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Adam Kalsey
Steven Garrity
September 20, 2003 8:18 PM
Dean Allen’s Word HTML Cleaner is also helpful for going form Word to HTML. Save as HTML from Word, then send that crazy markup through Allen’s parser. The end result isn’t bad at all.