Dreamweaver CS6: The Missing Manual

Adding Text in Dreamweaver

In Design view, Dreamweaver works much like a word-processing program. When you create a new document, the blinking cursor appears at the top of the page, ready for you to begin typing. When you finish typing a paragraph, you press Enter (Return) to start a new one. Text, as well as anything else you add to a web page, starts at the top of the page and works its way to the bottom.

If you build websites for clients or as part of a team, your writers likely send you their text as a word-processing document. You can copy text from that document (or from another source, like an email message) and paste it into Dreamweaver’s Design view; you have a couple of options for doing that.

Tip

If the text you want to paste comes from a Microsoft Word or Excel file, you’re lucky. Dreamweaver includes special commands for pasting text from these two programs (see Paste Special below). If you use Windows, you can import Word and Excel files directly into a web page using Dreamweaver’s File→Import→[Word/Excel] Document command (see Pasting Excel Spreadsheet Information).

Simple Copy and Paste

For non-Microsoft-spawned documents, you can, of course, simply copy and paste text, like generations of web designers before you.

Open the document in whatever program created it—WordPad, TextEdit, your email program, whatever. Select the text you want (by dragging through it, for example), or choose Edit⌘Select All (Ctrl+A [⌘-A]) to highlight all the text. Then choose Edit→Copy, or press ...