Exporting Dreamweaver Site Definitions

I recently switched computers, and needed to move all my websites and site definitions from one machine to the other. There are over twenty sets of usernames and passwords, which I was not looking forward to finding and re-imputting. To complicate matters, my websites would not be in the same place on my new machine.

Luckily, Dreamweaver has well-designed import and export tools. First step: on the old machine, bring up Dreamweaver, go to the Site menu and choose Manage Sites. Choose the sites you want to export in the left column (see below), then choose Export. To select multiple sites, use the Ctrl button. Dreamweaver will create a .ste file for every site you selected.

Copy the .ste files over to your new machine. Move your actual website files over to the new machine. Open Dreamweaver, choose Import, and browse to the .ste files (again, Ctrl will allow you to select multiple files). Dreamweaver will begin importing all the site definition information - including usernames and passwords, if you choose that option - into Dreamweaver.

Here's the best part: if your website folders and files are in a different spot on the new machine, as was the case with me, Dreamweaver will prompt you to browse to the new location to find both the root folder and the default images folder. Show Dreamweaver where the files and folders are, and that's it! All your websites are now defined on your new computer.

Converting docx, pptx and xlsx Files

As most of you probably know, when Microsoft released Office 2007, the file formats of the documents it created changed: .doc (Word documents) became .docx, .ppt (PowerPoint documents) became .pptx, and .xls (Excel documents) became .xlsx. What this meant is that people with earlier versions of Microsoft Office were unable to open the new file formats.

There are many file format converters out there, but Microsoft probably created the easiest, most seamless one, with the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack, available for free download at: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=3.

I like this converter (and use it on my personal laptop) because it converts the document all by itself. All you need to do is open the document in whatever version of MS Office you have, and the converter automatically recognizes the format as incompatible and converts and displays the document in a read-only version. You don't have to do a thing. The converted document can then be saved in an older file format (e.g. - .doc)

Some caveats: the compatability pack only converts Word, PowerPoint and Excel documents. And formatting choices that are not available in the older version of Office will be discarded. Overall, though, it is the easiest and cheapest way to convert Microsoft Office 07 and 2010 documents.