Philadelphia Standards Organization

I frequently get information for our site at work in an Excel file. This leaves me with two options. The first is to save as HTML and wade through hours of trash markup. It’s no secret that Microsoft Office documents saved as web pages create messy markup. This is tedious and takes forever. The second is to copy and paste into a text file and add my own markup. This option isn’t much better. It takes equally as long and there is a good chance you’re going to miss tags throughout the document.

There is a feature in Dreamweaver though that can help turn an ginormous task into a teeny one. Export your Excel spreadsheet as a comma delimited file. Then back in Dreamweaver select Insert -> Table Objects -> Import Tabular Data. Then you’ll select the delimited file. There will probably be some amount of column removing and row deleting. In the end you have a cleanly, and more importantly, quickly, marked up table.

Combine this with some CSS and a nice DOM script like Splintered Striper and you have an attractive, easily updated HTML table. This comes in handy if it’s information that is modified frequently.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 22nd, 2005 at 3:02 pm and is filed under XTHML, Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.