The Status Bar in Dreamweaver CS5

This tutorial will explain the use of the Status Bar in Dreamweaver CS5

When you're working on a document in Dreamweaver there are certain things you need to know about the document. This information includes such things as the size (in bytes) of the page, which is an important factor when looking at download times, etc.

When working with several documents (e.g. a whole set of web pages) open, at any one time one of the documents will be the one you're actually "editing". This is called the active document.

Near the bottom of the screen there is a horizontal bar called the Status Bar, and this contains information about the active document.

It's actually located right at the bottom of the window containing the active document, which is called the document window. It's above any panel (such as the Properties panel) below it.

Let's look at some of the important information and tools.

On the left hand end of the Status Bar is a section that shows the hierarchy of HTML tags around the part of the document that is currently selected. If you're not already familiar with HTML, this will mean more later when we look at code.

There are then some tools that it can be very useful to have readily to hand.

The arrow is the Select Tool and this is used to enable or disable the tool. The Hand Tool is a tool to drag a document into the document window. The magnifier is the Zoom Tool. We'll be looking at all of these in more detail later.

This tool is used set the magnification level.

You could try that now to see the impact that different levels of magnification have. The smaller the magnification you choose, the more of the document you'll be able to see.

This part of the Status Bar shows the window size, currently 1101x465 for my document window.

And finally, this section of the Status Bar shows the estimated document size and page download time.

You can set the window size and connection speed to be used for this part of the Status Bar by selecting Preferences... from the Edit menu and selecting the Status Bar category.

We'll be looking at Preferences in more detail later.

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