FrontPage98 Tips 

16. Turn delimited data into a table 

FrontPage 98 lets you save any form data you collect in a variety of formats. One of the most useful is a text database where the data is delimited either by a comma, a tab, or a space. If you want to analyze or process your collected data with a program like Microsoft Access, then a text database is the way to go. 

There may come a time, however, when you want to display that data on a page in your site. If you hand-code your site, there's no easy way to do this. Fortunately, FrontPage has a cool feature to organize your data into a nice neat table. 

All you need to do is copy and paste the data into a page as text. Highlight the text, and then select Table/Convert Text To Table. In the dialog box that appears, indicate the symbol that should separate the fields in your data (a comma, for example), then click OK. Your data is then automatically placed into a table format. 

For example, let's say you have a database with two records in it. One contains field names and the other contains data from a bug report form. The data might look something like this: 

"FPVer", "OSVer", "OneLiner", "ErrorMsg", "UserName", "UserEmail", "Date", "Time" "1.0", "Windows 95", "Crashes on startup", "mcxdata.dll not found", "Sam Spade", "sam@spade.com_", "7/30/98", "5:59:26 PM" 

If you use FrontPage's Convert Text To Table command on this data, it ends up looking like this: 

Your data probably has never looked prettier.

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