Importing and Exporting Table Data

This tutorial illustrates importing and exporting table data in Dreamweaver CS5.

It's possible to import data into and export data from Dreamweaver tables. The format used is delimited text file format with delimiters of spaces, tabs, commas, colons or semi-colons.

Here's a section of a delimited text file that I am going to import into Dreamweaver.

There are just 6 rows of data, with 7 items of data in each row. The items are separated by Tab characters.

I'm starting with a blank page. To import this data into Dreamweaver, I select the File menu. Hovering over the Import menu I see the fly-out.

Select Tabular Data... and I see the Import Tabular Data dialog.

First, I browse to find the file to be imported.

Next, I select the delimiter. In this case it's Tab.

Now decide about Table width. I'm letting Dreamweaver fit it to the data.

I select suitable values for Cell spacing, Cell padding and border.

If the first row contained headings I could choose a format, but in this case it doesn't so I leave this at (No formatting).

Here is the completed dialog.

Press OK, and the table is created and the data from the fie is imported into it.

Note how Dreamweaver automatically sets column widths to a reasonable optimum setting. We'll see later how we can adjust this if we need to.

To export table data we use the Table... option on the Export fly-out from the File menu.

Selecting Table... invokes the Export Table dialog.

You can choose your delimiter, which usually depends on the type of data you're exporting. For example, space is not a good delimiter if you're dealing with text that has spaces in already!

Line breaks will depend on the operating system you're using: Windows, Mac or Linux.

Once you've complete the dialog and click OK, the Export Table As dialog appears.

Select a folder and filename, click Save and the data in the table is exported to the specified text file using the chosen delimiter.

Note that you can't export part of a table, only the whole thing.

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