Dreamweaver CS6: The Missing Manual

Tabular Data

Since tables are meant to display data, Dreamweaver provides useful tools so you can 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 in one pass.

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

Note

Dreamweaver for Windows users don’t need to create a delimited-format file for Microsoft Excel data. It directly imports the data and converts it into a well-organized table. See Pasting Excel Spreadsheet Information for details.

In a delimited file, each line of text represents one table row. You keep the individual pieces of information in that line of text discrete using a special character called a delimiter—most often a tab, but possibly a comma or colon. Each ...