First Look Microsoft Office 2003

FrontPage 2003 includes so many improvements and enhancements that we'd need an entire chapter just to go through them all. Generally, the major changes include advances in the following areas:

• New and expanded coding features to make working with code much easier

• HTML authoring and cleanup features

• A great new editor with many new tools and views

• Direct text-file editing

• The ability to work with a larger number of source types and display using a wider range of browsers

• The option of previewing in multiple browsers

• Design changes to make formatting tables and Web Parts easier

• Integration with SharePoint Team Services to publish Web components and work seamlessly with SharePoint data lists and libraries

• Support for ASP.NET and script authoring

• Publishing to FTP and WebDAV servers

• A new data source catalog that enables you to add data views from SharePoint Team Services, XML, Web services, or Microsoft SQL Server

• A Web Part Gallery

• Integration with Microsoft Picture Library for simple image-editing tasks

  Tip

  The changes in FrontPage are substantial and could fill a book on their own. In fact, they do! See Jim Buyens's Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003 Inside Out (Microsoft Press, 2003), for more information.

New Look for FrontPage

FrontPage 2003 has a new layout for the main work window. (See Figure 8-15.) Now the navigation bar along the left of the window is gone, giving you more room on screen, along with four view buttons (Design, Split, Code, and Preview) that enable you to move easily among perspectives.

Figure 8-15: FrontPage 2003 includes a new look that makes better use of screen space and provides more tools within reach of the mouse.

New Views

The Split pane is an addition that enables you to see Design and Code views simultaneously. Also, line numbers are now displayed in Code (formerly HTML) view. A new Quick Tag toolbar gives you information about the tags used on the current line. (See Figure 8-16.)

Figure 8-16: New views in FrontPage enable you to see the effects of your work and make changes accordingly with help from the new Tag toolbar.

Table Layout Controls

FrontPage 2003 makes it easy to create tables of all kinds and add special effects, including rounded corners, borders, and shadows to individual cells. Using the Layout Tables And Cells task pane, you can create a layout table or choose settings for the entire table or individual cells.

New Browser Options

FrontPage 2003 allows you to preview your pages in a specific browser or in a number of different browsers. You can select the browser size and even display the same page in multiple browsers simultaneously.

Jim Buyens, author of Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003 Inside Out, thinks the dynamic templates feature will be a big help to users. He says, '...if I make a template for a Web page…I set up the background picture and set my text colors and put a header and footer on the page…I can then designate one or more areas on the page as editable, which means that the page that uses the template can put variable content in there. From there, you can open other Web pages and attach that template to them. The page template features-with the non-editable background, header, footer, and copyright information-appear on the page, with the customizable content in the middle.' This could be deployed to many different sites, across an organization. But now suppose I go back and change the template. FrontPage can now go out, find, and change all linked pages, so the template changes are made to all linked sites immediately with no effect on the content.