FrontPage use

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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.

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.

Steven Garrity
September 20, 2003 8:19 PM

Sorry, forgot the URL: http://textism.com/resources/cleanwordhtml/

Josh Santangelo
September 21, 2003 4:26 AM

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

Jon Gales
September 22, 2003 4:37 PM

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 :)

Adam Kalsey
September 24, 2003 1:19 PM

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.

Laura
October 2, 2003 5:25 PM

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!

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