Setting Preferences in Dreamweaver CS5

This tutorial illustrates setting preferences in Dreamweaver CS5.

We've already seen that we can customize the Dreamweaver environment in a number of ways, such as changing the view and using the rulers, the grid and guides.

There is another very important way that we can customize Dreamweaver, and that is to use Preferences.

Setting Preferences

To access Preferences, click on the Edit menu and you will find Preferences... near the bottom of the menu.

Click on Preferences... and you will see the Preferences dialog.

You can choose from the available categories in the left hand column and see which options are available for that category in the main part of the dialog page.

We'll be looking at several of these categories as we go through this course of tutorials, but let's just look at a few now.

With the General category selected the first option you can see is whether or not you want Dreamweaver to show the Welcome Screen.

The bottom option in the General category lets you specify which language to use for spell checking.

To change these particular preferences, uncheck the Show Welcome Screen box (as shown here) and change the spelling language using the dropdown then click OK.

Your new preferences are then set.

Another very important category is New Document.

Here you can set the default type for new documents. As you can see, mine is set at HTML at present. You can also see at the bottom of the dialog that when I press Ctrl+N for a new document Dreamweaver will show the New Document dialog.

Although some of the preferences may not mean much to you yet, it's worth taking a look at them to see what is available. For example, here is the page for the Preview in Browser category, where you can set preferences for use of local browsers to preview your pages.

We'll be referring back to these and other preferences later on.

If you found this Dreamweaver tutorial helpful, you may also be interested in these additional tutorials about the Dreamweaver CS5 work environment.

Working with Toolbars
Working with Panels
Creating a Workspace
The Status Bar
Working with Views
Changing the View / Zoom Tool
Working with Rulers
Grids & Guides
Keyboard Shortcuts
Setting Preferences

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