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| Summary of Content |
| A few notes on FrontPage that I found useful in the early days. There is plenty of others to be found on the web and I was going to add them here if I used them. However, with the introduction of FrontPage's replacement Expression Web in (January 2007), I'll not bother now and start a page for what is definitely a superior product. In fact I've abandoned Dreamweaver as well for the ease of use and real time validation of Expression Web. |
A double mouse click anywhere on the page (except when over hyperlinks) will take you back to the top. |
| Site / Page Link | Description of linked Site / Page |
| ● Office | |
| Columbia.edu | Useful Frontpage tips |
| ● How easy is it to add Microsoft Word and Excel tables to a Web site? |
| MS Word: Open the Word document containing the table you want to import. Open the Web page where you want the table to be placed in FrontPage Editor. In Word, click Table and click Select Table. Click and drag the table to your target Web page in FrontPage Editor. MS Excel: To click and drag a table from Excel, simply highlight the cells you want to import first. Once the table is in your Web page, you can use all of the FrontPage table-editing and table-drawing tools to modify your table and its contents. Note: There can be an awful amount of coding baggage which will not be that intuitive if you want to edit manually within the html page code. |
| ● I’ve imported a table from Excel, but I don’t like the borders. What do I do? |
| 1/ From the View menu, click Table Toolbar. 2/ On the Table toolbar, click the Eraser button. 3/ Drag across any internal boundary of a table to select it. When you release the mouse button, the boundary will disappear. |
| ● Drag and Drop |
| You've probably discovered that you can drag and drop page elements around in the
FrontPage Editor. But did you know that you can drag elements from other
open applications? For example, if you drag a group of cells in from Excel, FrontPage will format them as a table. What's more, the other application doesn't even have to be open. If you drag a document icon from the desktop into the FrontPage Editor, the program will extract the content and format it as HTML |
| ● What to Do When the AutoThumbnail Command Won't Work |
| Have you ever selected an image and tried to invoke the Auto Thumbnail command, only
to find that the command is greyed out? One of two things has happened. Perhaps you've selected more than just a single image. Try reselecting the image by clicking on it, not dragging across it. Another possible reason is that your image is smaller than the thumbnail would be. Go to the Tools menu and choose Options.... Then, reduce the number in the pixels field. |
| ● Color resources on the Web |
| Choosing colours for a Web site is never very easy, even with FrontPage. Finding just the
right combination of background, text, and link colours can mean multiple
trips to the Page Properties and Color dialog boxes. Unless, that is, you know about the ColorCenter. At the ColorCenter (www.hidaho.com/colorcenter), you'll see a sample page with a basic colour scheme. Choose which colour you want to change (text, for example), then choose a new value from the palette. The page automatically updates to reflect the new value and shows you the values to stick in your page's <body> tag. You can also find out a colour's value in hexadecimal (where white equals #FFFFFF), RGB (where white equals R:255, G:255, B:255), and percents (where white equals R:100%, G:100%, B:100%). Another handy Web colour resource can be found at the Project Cool Web site (www.projectcool.com/developer). Click on the References hyperlink to access a list of named colours. The list includes not just red, white, and blue, but also colours like salmon, linen, and turquoise. In addition to seeing what the colours look like, you can find out their hexadecimal values. |
| ● Create a bulleted list in a middle of a numbered list |
| Let's say you want to include a sequence of numbered steps on a page and are using the
numbered list format to number them. But in one of the steps, you want to
include a bulleted list of items. If you just change to the bulleted list
format, then your numbered list is broken and the next numbered item starts again at 1. So how can you have integrate both types of lists? Insert a single-cell table within your numbered list and place your bulleted list inside the table. Doing so lets you format each list separately. This technique would also work if you wanted a self-contained numbered list to appear within another numbered list. |
| ● Create a Mail to Link |
| FrontPage makes it easy to create a mailto link (a hyperlink that will create an E-mail
message addressed to the person you designate). Just type the E-mail
address, such as "frontpage@aperson.com" onto your page, then press the space
bar or [Tab]. FrontPage will convert the address to a mailto link. Once FrontPage has created the link, you can go back and change its wording without affecting the link. For example, you could change "Send mail to frontpage@aperson.com" to read "Send mail to Inside Microsoft FrontPage." The words "Inside Microsoft FrontPage" would still be a mailto link to frontpage@aperson.com. To change the link address, double-click the link and press [Alt] [Enter]. |
| ● Fixing a CDF bug |
| When you specify a ending date in a Channel Definition Format (CDF) file,
FrontPage's CDF Wizard includes an EndDate attribute in the <schedule>
tag, as shown here: <Schedule EndDate="1998.09.04T00:00+0000"> However, the EndDate tag will not be supported in the next version of Internet Explorer. StopDate will be supported instead. To fix this problem in your CDF file, just open the file in a word processor and change EndDate to StopDate. |
| ● Forcing pages to reload |
| While most Web pages are relatively stable, you may have some that change frequently. For
example, you might have a page that dynamically displays your company's
stock quote, changing on a minute-by-minute basis throughout the day. Unfortunately, if the page is cached on the user's machine, more recent versions may never appear. What you need in this case is a way to tell the browser not to cache the page. You can do this easily with a meta tag. Just add the following to the <head> section of your page: <meta http-equiv="Pragma" content="no-cache"> Now, every time a user hits the page, the latest version will be downloaded from the server. |
| ● Get your site listed by a search engine |
| If you build it and they don't come, it's probably because your site isn't listed in the
major search engines (like AltaVista) and directories (like Yahoo). While
we can't cover all the details of submitting your site in this tip, we can
give a few guidelines: * Decide what keywords people will use to find your site, and be sure to include those keywords near the top of your home page. Don't just bury them somewhere else in your site. * At the same time, however, don't "spam" the search engines by repeating your keywords dozens of times. Most search engines will disqualify your site if they detect this process. * Be sure your site is live before you submit it. If the search engine can't find your site, it won't list it. (This seems obvious, but some people are so anxious to submit their sites that they jump the gun.) * Use <META> tags to describe your site and give keywords. Some search engines rely on these tags. * Follow each search engine's guidelines. Don't submit a 50-word site description if the guidelines ask for 25 words. And don't use all capital letters in descriptions. |
| ● Hit Counter |
| The Hit Counter component in FrontPage 98 lets you pick your own custom GIF as a source
for the counter's digits. This GIF is a single image with the digits 0-9 evenly spaced along a single line. You can create such a GIF yourself in Image Composer, or you can grab one of the Web. |
| ● Image looks same as browser |
| It's no secret that images that look great in Image Composer--and even in FrontPage
Editor--can look much different in a browser. One way to see exactly how your images will look is to reconfigure FrontPage to open GIFs and JPGs in your browser instead of Image Composer when you double-click on them. To do this, choose Options... from FrontPage Explorer's Tools menu. Then click the Configure Editors tab. Select GIF from the list and click the Modify... button. Then, click the Browse... button and navigate to your copy of Internet Explorer. (The default path is C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\Iexplore.exe, where C is your hard disk letter.) Click OK, then repeat the process with JPG. Now, whenever you double-click an image, it will open in the browser. To edit an image, launch Image Composer first, then open the file as you normally would. |
| ● Making text flow around an image |
| If you want your text to flow around an image, you'll need to add an alignment setting
to your image. Right-click the image and choose Image Properties... from
the context menu. Then, choose Left or Right from the Alignment dropdown
list. (With left alignment, the text will flow around the image's right side; with right alignment, just the opposite will happen.) To add space between the image and the text, enter numbers in the Horizontal Space and Vertical Space fields. If you prefer to work directly in HTML, here's what the <img> tag would look like: <img src="yourfile.gif" border=0 width=250 height=300 align=left hspace=5 vspace=5> |
| ● Making a Web Directory Unreadable |
| A standard way of saving form results in FrontPage is to use the default form handler
(also called the WebBot Save Results component) to write to a results file in a directory in a FrontPage web. In FrontPage 1.1 and FrontPage 97, writing form results to a directory made the contents of the directory readable to any user who discovered the URL of the results file. In FrontPage 98, you can assign a virtual directory mapping for a form results directory that has both the execute and the read bits turned off. This prevents any end-user from reading the contents of the directory, but it requires the FrontPage web author to fetch the contents of the directory using the FrontPage Explorer. To make a directory unreadable, select it in the FrontPage Explorer's Folders view and select Properties from the Edit menu. In the Folder Properties dialog box, deselect the two settings: Allow scripts or programs to be run and Allow files to be browsed. |
| ● Making form text fields wrap in Navigator |
| With text boxes in forms or discussion forums, there's a key difference in the way
Microsoft Internet Explorer handles text entry from the way Netscape
handles it. Whereas IE automatically wraps the text inside a text box,
Netscape's text simply runs off the edge without wrapping. Fortunately, there's an easy solution. First, create the text box using Frontpage Editor. Then, click the HTML tab to switch to HTML view. As part of the coding for the textbox, you should see something like this: <textarea rows="12" name="Contact" cols="8" ></textarea> To ensure that text will wrap correctly in Netscape, type wrap="virtual" directly into the HTML coding. It should look like this: <textarea rows="12" name="Contact" cols="8" wrap="virtual"> Now the text will wrap correctly in both browsers. |
| ● Providing a text alternative to your image |
| When you place an image in FrontPage, the program adds an alternate text representation,
or "<ALT> tag," to it, something like "logo.gif (286 bytes)". You can--and
should--change this text to something more descriptive in the Image
Properties dialog box. (Select the image, then choose Image Properties...
from the Edit menu. Look for the Text field in the Alternate
Representations section of the dialog box.) An image's text alternate is displayed if the user has turned off image loading or hits the Stop button before a page loads completely (which we probably all do from time to time). Also, in Internet Explorer, the text appears as a Tooltip that pops up when the cursor hovers over the image. |
| ● Quickly opening a linked page in FrontPage Editor |
| When you're working on an HTML file in FrontPage Editor (in Normal view), you can
quickly open an additional existing page by holding the [Ctrl] key and clicking on the link in your document. This is easier and quicker than opening the file from the File menu. In Preview view, however, clicking a link only temporarily opens the linked page. When you return to Normal or HTML view, the linked file will not remain open. |
| ● Removing page margins in FrontPage |
| By default, FrontPage includes a small margin along the top and left margins of your
page. You can remove this margin easily (for most browsers at least). To do so, right-click on an empty area of the page and select Page Properties... from the popup menu. Then, click the Margins tab. Enable either or both of the check boxes on this page (Specify Top Margin and Specify Left Margin). Leave the default value (zero) to eliminate the margins. You can achieve the same effect by editing the <body> tag in your page's HTML as follows: <body topmargin="0" leftmargin="0"> Note: Netscape Navigator ignores these settings. |
| ● The dreaded blue border |
| When you turn an image into a link in FrontPage, the program automatically adds a blue
border around it. While you may want such a border on occasion, more often
than not it's distracting and just plain ugly. Fortunately, you can get rid of the border quickly. First, right-click the image and choose Image Properties... from the context menu. Now, click the Appearance tab and type a zero in the Border Thickness field. (Leaving the field blank is NOT the same as entering a zero!) |
| ● Using Cascading Style Sheets to change your Form buttons |
| Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a Web standard supported primarily by the "version 4"
browsers. It lets you control dozens of aspects of your pages' appearance. One easy thing you can do with CSS is change the font and colours of your form buttons. To do so, first insert a button as you ordinarily would. Then, right-click on the button and choose Form Field Properties... from the context menu. Click the Style... button to open the Style dialog box. To change the font of the button caption, switch to the Font page of the dialog and choose a new font from the Primary Font dropdown list. (You should also choose a "generic" secondary font, such as sans-serif, in case your primary font is not available on the user's machine.) To change the colour scheme, switch to the Colours page. The foreground colour you choose here will be the text colour; the background colour will be the colour of the button itself. Click OK twice to return to your page. Since CSS hasn't been universally adopted, your results will vary. However, older browsers should simply ignore your specifications and style the button as usual. |
| ● Using Photoshop Plug-In with Image Composer |
| Microsoft Image Composer, the image editor that comes bundled with FrontPage, supports
Adobe PhotoShop plug-ins. To install these extensions, just copy them into the Plugins folder in your Microsoft Image Composer folder. You can also tell the program to look in another directory for your plug-ins. Choose Options... from the Tools menu, click the Plug-ins tab, and type the alternate directory's path there. Next time you launch Image Composer, it will load plug-ins from the default directory and from the directory you specify. |
| ● Add Tables from Word or Microsoft Excel |
| If you've created a table in
Microsoft Word or Excel, you may easily add it to a Web page in your
FrontPage site. Simply select and drag the table from the Office application and drop it on your target Web page in the FrontPage Editor, or copy the table from the Office application, switch to your target Web page in the FrontPage Editor, and choose Paste from the FrontPage Editor's Edit menu. Either way, the table is added to your Web page and in doing so, FrontPage automatically generates the code behind the scenes, so you never have to worry about writing HTML! You may then easily use all of FrontPage's table editing and table-drawing tools to edit your table and its contents. |
| ● Sending Results to E-Mail |
| When you create a form in
FrontPage 98, you may choose how you would like your form results to be
submitted and handled. For instance, you may choose to have results sent to any file on any server that you have designated, or--new to FrontPage 98--you may now also have the results sent directly to an E-mail address. To do this, double-click the Submit button to access the Push Button Properties dialog box, then click the Form… button to access the Form Properties dialog. In this dialog, simply enter the address in the E-mail Address text field. |
| ● Frontpage Menus Versus buttons |
| Choosing a FrontPage 98 menu
item doesn’t always yield the same results as clicking on the associated
toolbar button. Case in point: the New command. Clicking the New button on the toolbar in the FrontPage Editor creates and opens a single blank page in the FrontPage Editor, but choosing New… from the File menu opens a dialog box that lets you choose from a number of new page templates, including frames page templates, for automatically creating pages that include forms, multiple columns and aligned text, frames, and more. As a rule of thumb, when the actions differ, the toolbar button is more likely to quickly yield a single result, while a menu item may reveal more options. |
| ● Cleaning up the Tasks view history |
| Completed tasks normally
disappear from the Tasks View in FrontPage Explorer whenever you refresh
the display or close the FrontPage Web. If you enable Task History on the View menu, however, all tasks, completed or not, will be appear in the task list. If you use the Task History to maintain a log for your Web site project, you may want to remove completed tasks from the history file as well. Select a task and choose Delete… from the Edit menu to remove it for good. |
| ● Quickly modify page elements |
| In FrontPage 98, many of the
characteristics assigned to a page element--such as paragraph formatting,
image attributes, or FrontPage Component attributes--are selected by
manipulating various settings in the corresponding feature's Properties
dialog box. To reach the various Properties dialog boxes more quickly, simply use your mouse and right-click on the page element in the FrontPage Editor. When you do, a context-sensitive menu will pop up, allowing you to open that element's Properties dialog in order to make changes easily. |
| ● Single space returns or Insert Line break |
| When you hit [Enter] when
working on a page in FrontPage 98 Editor's Normal Tab view, the program
inserts the equivalent of a double space return, marked in the HTML view
by the </p> tag. Depending on your design needs, this may be too much space to insert between items on a page. Fortunately, it's equally simple to insert a single space instead. To create a single space return, marked by the HTML tag <br>, hold down [Shift] while pressing [Enter]. |
| ●Manage your site with improved views |
| FrontPage 98 offers you a
variety of ways to view the files in your FrontPage Web site. Each view
offers its own advantages when you perform Web site maintenance and
management tasks. For instance, if you highlight a file in the Folders View, the All Files View, the Navigation View or the Hyperlinks View, that file will remain selected when you switch to one of the other views. You might do this, for example, if you find a file in the All Files View that you want to move from one folder into another folder. Select the file in the All Files View, switch to the Folders View, and then drag the file to its new location. |
| ● Changing two frames with one click |
| When you create a Web site that includes frames, you can easily use a hyperlink in one
frame to change the contents of a second frame. But you may often want to
change two frames with one click. To do so, add the following parameter to the HTML that defines the link: onClick="parent.frame2.location.href="target2.htm" The complete HTML for the link would then look something like this: <a href="target1.htm" target="frame1" onClick="parent.frame2.location.href="target2.htm">Click Here</a> Of course, you'll need to substitute the names of your actual frames and actual target documents. |
| ● Link to external pages from a navigation bar |
| One of the most frustrating things about FrontPage's otherwise nifty "automatic"
navigation bar feature is that it won't let you create a button that links
to an external URL. A large Web site, for example, must be broken up into
a number of child Webs under a master root Web. To assemble the site one
needs to create links from the root Web to each child Web and vice versa. FrontPage navigation view can only create links between pages within a single Web. The workaround is simple. Just create a blank page and place it in the proper spot on the FrontPage Explorer navigation view hierarchy. Name it whatever you want the button to say. Then, open this placeholder page in FrontPage Editor's HTML view and add the following line of code: <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; URL=http://www.targetURL.com/"> where http://www.targetURL.com is the site you want to link to. This meta tag makes the placeholder page a redirection page with "0" seconds delay before the browser is automatically pointed to http://www.targetURL.com. FrontPage is happy. It creates a button with whatever text you want, and the Web surfer gets to the proper destination with negligible delay. |
| ● Quickly replicating navigation bars |
| If you've set up a navigation bar in your top shared border, you can easily replicate
that navigation bar in your bottom shared border. Just right-click on the
navigation bar and choose Copy from the shortcut menu. Then, right-click in the bottom border and choose Paste. You might not want to have two identical navigation bars on the same page, of course, but you could set the second bar up to display text buttons instead of icons. To do so, just double-click it and choose Text in the Orientation And Appearance panel. You can then adjust the font size of these text links, which gives a really nice lower page navigation tool, similar to many professional sites today. This works especially well if you have a long page. And of course both bars stay in sync with any navigation changes you make to the page. |
| ● Remove text formatting |
| Recently we shared some ways to remove the formatting from text you paste into
FrontPage. Here's one more way: Simply highlight the text you've pasted in and choose Remove Formatting from the Format menu. Or, from the keyboard, press [Ctrl][Shift]Z or hold down [Ctrl][spacebar]. |
| ● Colorful text rollovers in FrontPage |
| Have you ever visited a Web site (like Microsoft's) where hyperlinks change
colours when
you move the mouse over them? Creating this effect is easy using Cascading
Style Sheets (CSS). Although older browsers don't support CSS, they also
won't cause problems with your pages-users of those browsers simply won't
see the rollover effect. First, you'll need to define two CSS classes: textRed and textGreen. To do so, choose Stylesheet from the Format menu and add the following between the <-- and --> arrows: A {text-decoration: none} textGreen { color:green; text-decoration: none } textRed { color:red; text-decoration: none Be sure to include the period before each class name. Next, switch to HTML view and find the code that defines your link. Add the following parameters to the <a href> tag: onmouseover="this.className='textGreen'" onmouseout="this.className='textRed'" The entire tag will look something like this: <a href="target.htm" onmouseover="this.className='textGreen'" onmouseout="this.className='textRed'"> You'll see the result when preview the page. |
| Hyperlink titles may have been abbreviated, (right click on the link and select properties for the full URL) |
 A double mouse click anywhere on the page will take you back to the top (except when over hyperlinks) |
Last Update 04/03/2008 - Frontpage - Reference - Web Development - Neils Resource Web
