I have a habit of previewing my web pages each and every time I make any change to them. Then I key in CTRL + S or choose ‘Save’ from the common toolbar and then hit F12 or ‘Preview’ from common toolbar; to preview the page. You need to save your web page before you preview it in the browser, hence these two steps. But at times you forget to save your page before you hit F12 and you are prompted with a warning to save your changes before you preview them. 

Though one click on ‘OK’ in this window would directly take you to the preview in the browser, it is irritating to get such warnings when you are in the middle of something and desperately making something to work.

This warning could be disabled and you could ask Microsoft Expression Web to automatically save your page before previewing. Follow either of the following steps:

1.       In above warning, check the box – ‘Automatically save page before previewing’.

2.       Go to File > Preview in Browser > Edit Browser List…

Check the same box – ‘Automatically save page before previewing’.

Now you can hit F12 or choose to preview your page as soon as you create/edit it without having to save it explicitly.

Rearrange Commands tool lets you do all possible actions to customize your toolbars and menus the way you want them. You can rearrange the commands on the toolbar to:

·         Add, remove, reorder the commands on the menu bar and toolbar.

·         Modify the name, image and keyboard shortcut associated with a menu command or button on the toolbar.

To launch the Rearrange Commands dialog box, go to Tools > Customize. In the Customize dialog box, go to the Commands tab and click Rearrange Commands.

Use the Rearrange Commands dialog box to do the following:

1.       Choose a menu or toolbar to rearrange: Select the Menu Bar or Toolbar you want to change.

2.       Controls: Select the controls you want to change.

3.       Add: Click the button to add a new control.

4.       Delete:  Click the button to delete a control.

5.       Move Up: Click the button to move the control up in a menu bar or towards left on a toolbar.

6.       Move Down: Click the button to move the control down in a menu bar or towards right on a toolbar.

7.       Modify Selection: The drop down menu has a number of options like;

·         Reset – resets the control

·         Delete – deletes the control

·         Name – You can enter a name for the control along with its keyboard shortcut. In the above image; &File… denotes ALT + N is the keyboard shortcut to access File menu.

·         Copy Button Image – lets you copy the button image associated with this control.

·         Paste Button Image – lets you paste a button image.

·         Reset Button Image – resets the button image to its default.

·         Edit Button Image – lets you edit the button image.

·         Change Button Image… – lets you choose a new button image from the menu.

·         Default Style – set the style of the button to its default.

·         Text Only (Always) – sets to always display only text for the control.

·         Text Only (in Menus) – sets to always display only text for control only when it appears in a menu.

·         Image and Text – lets you always display an image and text for the control.

·         Begin a Group – adds a group separator bar.

·         Assign Macro… – lets you link a control to a macro.

8.       Reset: Resets any and all the actions you carried out on the menu bar and toolbar.

To set up Microsoft Expression Web 2 to automatically open your last edited website, you need to change the startup options for Expression Web.

Go to Tools > Application Options… to open the Application Options dialog box as shown below:

On the General tab, under the Startup section, check the preference ‘Open last Web site automatically when Expression Web starts’ and click on OK. Turn this option off if you do not want Expression Web to open the last website you were working on when Expression Web is launched.

When you choose ‘Paste’ from the Edit menu or press ‘CTRL+V’ in the design view of the web page, to paste a copied piece of text, the Paste Options button  appears just below the pasted text. As you hover over your mouse on the button, it displays a down arrow next to it. Click on the arrow to get a menu as shown below:

Let us explore each of these options in detail.

1.       Match Destination Formatting

This is the default option chosen when you paste text into your Expression Web document.

If the source document contains a style that has same name as your destination document, this option applies the styles defined in the destination document and not from the source from where the text is copied. For instance if you copy a Heading 1 text from a Microsoft Word document and paste it into the page in Expression Web, the pasted text would be formatted according to the Heading 2 style defined in Expression Web.

2.       Keep Source Formatting

This option retains the styles of the source document from where the text is copied, not considering the styles in the destination Expression Web document.

In the above example the Heading 1 would be retained as it would appear in the Microsoft Word document after it is pasted in the Expression Web page.

3.       Remove Formatting

This option removes all formatting and pastes the text as plain text.

4.       Keep HTML Only

This option can only be used when you are copying any HTML code and you want to render the text in the code rather than displaying the tags. For instance, <pre>This is a piece of text </pre> would be displayed in a preformatted

5.       Keep Text Only…

Choose this option when you want to paste just the text from the source. When you choose this option you get the Paste Text dialog box shows up.

Paste Text dialog box contains more options to format your text. For more details about Paste text options, see Import and format content from other documents in Microsoft Expression Web

Go to Site menu > choose Site Settings… This will launch the Site Settings dialog box (see image below)

Choose the Preview tab and various options available are explained below:

1.       Preview using website URL – Choose this to preview the site using the website URL.

2.       Use Microsoft Expression Development Server – Check this box and select ‘For only PHP and ASP.NET web pages’ if you want to use Expression Development Server to preview ‘.aspx’ pages only. Expression Development Server supports only server side languages such as ASP.NET and PHP. Choose For all web pages for ‘.htm’, ’.html’ and ‘.aspx’ pages.

3.       Preview using custom URL for this website – Enter a path or browse to the location of the website.

I found it extremely convenient to choose a font when I can see how it actually looks. Microsoft Expression Web gives you a choice to set the font list in their font. Here is how you can do that:

Go to Tools > choose Customize. In the Customize dialog box, switch to the Options tab.

Under the ‘Other’ section, check the box – List font names in their font.

NOTE: Change in this setting will affect all Microsoft Office applications too.

Spacing can be set between characters, words, lines and paragraphs. The Font dialog box contains text space settings for characters and words; whereas the Paragraph dialog box lets you adjust the space between lines and paragraphs.

To set spacing between characters:

1.       In Design, Split or Code view; select the piece of text you want to adjust the spacing for.

2.       Go to Format > Font…

3.       In the Font dialog box, switch to Character Spacing tab.

4.       In the Spacing drop down box, choose Expanded to increase the space or Condensed to decrease the space.

5.       If you want set the spacing to be normal (default selection) but want to change that a bit, then in the ‘By’ drop down box, set the number of points to specify the exact increase or decrease in the character space.

6.       Click OK.

TIP: You can also choose the position of the characters in the Position drop down box.

To set spacing between words, lines and paragraphs:

1.       In Design, Split or Code view; select the piece of text you want to adjust the spacing for.

2.       Go to Format > Paragraph…

3.       In the Paragraph dialog box, under the Spacing section; do one or more of the following:

·         Enter value in pixels or use the arrows to increase or decrease spacing before the paragraph in the Before box.

·         Enter value in pixels or use the arrows to increase or decrease spacing after the paragraph in the After box.

·         Enter value in pixels or use the arrows to increase or decrease spacing between words in the Word box.

·         Click on the drop down and choose an option to set spacing between lines in the Line Spacing box.

4.       The Preview in the dialog box gives you an idea of how the new spacing would look in your page.

5.       Click OK.

TIP: You can also set the indentation by choosing an option from the Alignment drop down box.