Microsoft
Front Page 98

Tutorials,
Tips, Tricks,
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Creating a professional-looking Web site using FrontPage is easier than ever. This unique Editor builds complete sites in which all pages share a consistent, easily modified design, including navigation tools that the program builds automatically when you add or remove pages.

Cleaning Up the Tasks View History

Completed tasks normally disappear from the Tasks View in FrontPage Explorer whenever you refresh the display or close the FrontPage Web. If you enable Task History on the View menu, however, all tasks, completed or not, will be appear in the task list. If you use the Task History to maintain a log for your Web site project, you may want to remove completed tasks from the history file as well. Select a task and choose Delete… from the Edit menu to remove it for good.

Controlling which form fields to save

When you inspect the results file of a FrontPage form you've created, you may discover a field name called "B1" that has no data associated with it. This "phantom" field is actually your form's Submit button. While passing this field name to your form's results file shouldn't cause you any problems, you can easily instruct FrontPage not to pass the name to the data file.
To do so, right-click within the dashed area of the form on your page in the FrontPage Editor and select Form Properties... from the context menu. In the resulting dialog box, click the Options... button. Then, in the Options For Saving Results Of Form dialog, click the Saved Fields tab. Delete B1 (and any other unwanted fields), then click OK twice to return to your page, and save your page.

Designating a custom form confirmation page

When you create an online form, FrontPage automatically generates a confirmation page. This page, which appears after the user clicks the Submit button, lists the data he or she entered and includes a link back to the form.
If you don't like the standard page, you can create your own and instruct FrontPage to display your custom page instead.
With your form page open in the FrontPage Editor and your mouse cursor positioned within the dashed line area of the form, right click your mouse and select the Forms Properties dialog from the resulting dropdown menu.
Then, in the Form Properties dialog, click the Options button, and in the resulting Options for Saving Results of Form dialog box, select the Confirmation Page tab and enter the URL of your confirmation page.
By the way, the URL you enter can be for any page, not just a true confirmation page.

Erasing Table Borders in FrontPage 98

Tables are a great way to format information on Web pages. With tables, you can easily align columns of information, the fields within your online forms, and other page elements.
The table-drawing tools in FrontPage 98 make tables even more useful. Using one of these new table tools, the Eraser, you can remove cell boundaries with a click of the wrist . To do so, first click the Eraser toolbar button on the Table toolbar in the FrontPage Editor. Then, drag across any internal boundary of a table to select it. When you release the mouse button, the boundary will disappear and the adjacent cells will merge into one.
To turn off eraser mode, click the Eraser icon again, click outside the table, or double-click within the table.

Establish passwords that protect

If your FrontPage web server is on a network, you'll probably want to use the Explorer Tools menu's Permissions... command to establish passwords that protect your webs from intruders. However, you may not be aware that the permissions you set in FrontPage can be easily sidestepped by anyone who knows the network path to your web documents (and they aren't hard to find).
An intruder can simply use the Other Location tab in the Editor's Open File dialog box to navigate to and access an HTML page without ever opening a FrontPage web. Therefore, it's imperative that you ask your system administrator to set up substantial network password protection for your web resources.

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