Expression Web Help

Welcome to Thomas Brunt's OutFront, a "newbie-friendly" webmaster learning community. Here you have quality Microsoft Expression Web help -- tutorials, forums, tools, templates, consulting and Microsoft Expression Web Hosting to make your Web site great. Join us. :)

Expression Quick Tips

General information for making better use of Microsoft Expression Web.

Setting Up an Expression Web Designer Template

Expression Web Designer comes with great pure-css web templates.

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Using The FrontPage Search and Include Page Bots in Expression.

The good news about your FP Bots in Expression Web is that they will still work just fine after you upgrade. The bad news is that Expression Web does not have any menus that allow you to automatically insert new FP bots.  But that's not going to stop us.  Is it?

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How to Select Code in Expression Web

Expression Web makes it easy to find the code you're looking for.  You can choose to select only the start or end tag, or only the content that resides between the tags, or the tags and the content.

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Key Commands in Expression Web

A keyboard shortcut allows you to select a menu command or button by pressing ALT+<single letter> instead of using the mouse. For example, to open the Edit menu, press ALT+E.

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Testing Screen Resolutions with "Page Size"

It's a pain to constantly change your monitor resolution settings to make sure your page looks right different monitors.  Expression Web Designer greatly simplifies this process.   Just do View. > Page Size. > Select a Screen Resolution. > Look, and edit while you're in that resolution if your page is broken.

How to Customize Design View Colors and Font Style

Here's an easy way to make sure you can find different items on your page in design view very quickly.   Do Tools > Page Editor Options> Color Coding tab > select Design view settings. > Under Display items, select the item you want to change. > Select an Item foreground, Item background, and set Font style options.

To reset color coding to the default, click Reset Defaults.

How to Set Copy and Paste Options

By default, EWD shows a "Paste Options" button in "Design View" when you're pasting an element into a page.  The button give you the options to do the following.

Options for Pasting Text

• Use Destination Styles
  Get rid of the styles copied from the original document, and use the styles in the current Expression Web Designer document instead.
• Keep Source Formatting
  Keep the style formatting of the source document, regardless of the styles in the current Expression Web Designer document.
• Keep Text Only
  Deletes all formatting and pastes the selection as plain text.
• Treat as HTML Tags
  Web Designer to renders rather than displays HTML tags.
   

Options for Pasting Graphics

• Keep Source Formatting
  Use this option to preserve the positioning attributes that were applied to the drawing object in the source document
• Resample Picture to Match Size
  Use this option to resize and resample an image you paste into your Web page from an external source.

Some people find this button annoying.  You can get rid of it by doing Tools > Page Editor Options > Under "General" uncheck "show paste options."

Locating Unused Files

Want to cleanup your site by deleting all the files you don't need?  I recommend that you make a copy of your site before you do this just in case of the off chance that you delete something you wanted to keep, but it's very nice to be able to relieve yourself of all your dead files with a few keystrokes.  Just do Site > Reports > Problems > Unlinked Files.  You can delete all of the files that show up in that view.