Adding text in Dreamweaver

Hi my name is Dan and in this video we are going to look at adding text to Dreamweaver. Now it’s kind of weird I guess having this so late in the piece because we’ve been adding text as we've been going along right? And there haven’t been any problems. Now one of the reasons might be, is that I've given you some text that has been nice and clean. Now what I mean by that is say that I copy and paste some text from an email or from a word document, there can be problems with Dreamweaver. Okay because what it does it when you do a copy from something say like word, and I copy all of this text, can you see it’s got some styling? Its blue, it’s bold, it’s actually set up as a heading in word, now if I copy and paste it straight into Dreamweaver. Watch this, if I paste him there, click inside this, can you see it here? It’s brought it in and its put it in as an h1 because its guessed it from word. As a heading 1 and its big, it’s bold.

So quite often you don’t want to bring through the styling from either, it can bring in some really crazy styling, that was a real basic one just to show you, its wrapped it up in an h1 tag. But it can bring in all sorts of junk you do not need, to get round that, one of two ways is what I tend to do is I use text edit or notepad. So text edit on a mac or notepad on a pc. And you can kind of cut the text down to what’s called plain old text; there it is there. It says make plain text, and it removes all of the formatting and becomes really basic, just plain old, easy to import text. The other way is I'm going to undo this from here.

Go to edit, paste special, so I've copied it from word already, I'm going to go to paste special and I've got these options in here so I can bring in text only. The only trouble with text only is that it, text only, but removes all the returns, so if you’ve got say 10 paragraphs, it will remove all the formatting which is great but it will remove the spaces between paragraphs as well so you got to go through and put all the returns in which is a real pain. So I don’t like doing it this way, so the best way is to clean it up in mac, remember use something called text edit and switch it to plain text. Now if you're using a pc use notepad. You might have to go and find it, its installed on all windows pcs and it’s a real basic text editor. And if you’ve copied from word, paste it into notepad and then copy and paste it back into Dreamweaver.

That’s the quickest and easiest way to get text that is nice and clean into Dreamweaver.