Dreamweaver 4 Layout View Tutorial

Moving and Resizing

 

Here is where alot of beginners get confused. The manual and Help files state that the tables and cells can be moved and resized with the mouse. Yet, when they try nothing happens. Here is where the mystery will be explained.

 

Continuing from the Getting Started page.

 

Moving/Resizing

Tables and cells can only be moved or resized provided there is room to do so. As long as there is "open" gray area to the tops or sides, they can be moved or resized. Dreamweaver will display an icon when what your trying to do isn't permitted. Basically, you can't move tables or cells out of the container that holds them, nor overlap or nudge other tables or cells that are already in place.

Selecting/Dragging

Tables can be selected and/or dragged by placing the mouse over the green table tab or by clicking in the gray area of the table itself. Click and drag the larger of the nested tables snug to the upper left hand corner of the larger outer table. Do the same with the smaller nested tables. Remember, the table at the very top is completely seperate. We will deal with this one shortly.

* When moving a table, any and all content including other tables and cells move with it.

Arrow keys

We don't need to reposition the tables anymore at this point, however it is important to know that the arrow keys work to acomplish this as well. Select either of the nested tables and move them around using the keyboards arrow keys. Each arrow stroke moves the table 1 pixel. Shift+Arrow moves them 10 pixels. When finished, restore the table(s) you just moved to the upper left.

Now select the inner nested table by clicking inside of it, grab the handle on the right side and resize it smaller than you want your nav bar to be. Select the larger "nested" table and resize it snug around the smaller one and all the way to the bottom of the larger table.

At this point sizing the Nav bar smaller than the images we propose to insert will save us work later on. I will explain why when we actually insert them.

Here is what we should have so far.

* Click on the pic for larger screenshot

 

Inserting Cells/Content