Although Dreamweaver's time line is similar to the ones in Macromedia's Director and Flash, what we want to talk about here is a unique feature of Dreamweaver.
Microsoft Word format documents are quite common, especially in educational circles. What you would like to do is to convert these documents to a form suitable for the Web, that is, have the Word format converted to HTML format. One option is to go through your document and add the appropriate header tags, paragraph tags, and a minimal amount of other formatting to make the document look marginally acceptable on the Web. Another option is to use a recent edition of Microsoft Word, such as the one found in Office 2000, and under File, use the Save as feature to save your document in HTML. Voila, you might say. This is wonderful and aren't you done at this point? Here is the problem. Microsoft Word's conversion adds a huge amount of additional markup to your document, increasing its size and complexity tremendously. We recently had the experience of using this convenient feature on a small document. It was blown up so large by the save as html feature that our server rejected the document as being too big. So, here we were. At one extreme, we could go in and hand code the html. At the other, we could use Word's save as feature, but then we would have had to break up the document into 3 pieces which would not make logical sense to readers.
Dreamweaver 3 comes to the rescue. It has a command called Word Clean Up. It will clean up these extraneous commands. Then, after that is done, you can use Dreamweaver's WYSIWYG features to spruce up the document a bit, such as adding some color, images, and even music. All of this is quite quick and gives good results.
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