Dreamweaver CS5: The Missing Manual

Tabular Data

Since tables are meant to display data, Dreamweaver provides useful tools to import and work with data.

Importing Data into a Table

Say your boss emails you your company’s yearly sales information, which includes data on sales, profits, and expenses organized by quarter. She asks you to get this up on the Web for a board meeting she’s having in half an hour.

This assignment could require a fair amount of work: building a table and then copying and pasting the correct information into each cell of the table, one at a time. Dreamweaver makes your task much easier, because you can create a table and import data into its rows and columns, all in one pass.

For this to work, the table data you want to display must begin life in a delimited format—a task that most spreadsheet programs, including Excel, or database programs, such as Access or FileMaker Pro, can do easily. (In most programs, you can do this by choosing File→Export or File→Save As; then choose a tab-delimited or comma-separated text file format.)

Note

Windows users don’t need to create a delimited format file if they have data in an Excel file. You can directly import Excel files into Dreamweaver for Windows, which converts the data into a well-organized table. See Pasting Excel Spreadsheet Information for details.

In a delimited file, each line of text represents one table row. That line is divided into discrete pieces of information using a special character called a delimiter—most often a tab, but possibly a comma ...