Microsoft Expression Web 4 does not have all the ease of use and features of Dreamweaver, but it is free, so you may find this useful in the future if Dreamweaver is not available and you want something more than a code editor.

Microsoft Expression Web 4 dates from 2011 and is now available as a free download at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=36179 and will not be updated by Microsoft.

• Switching between Design, Code, and Split View in Expression Web can be done by choosing the appropriate button at the bottom left of the screen or by choosing View>Page and then choosing from these three alternatives.
• Although Microsoft Front Page would sometimes generate non-standard code, Expression Web generates standard HTML and CSS code.
• Preferences similar to DW Edit>Preferences can be set in Expression Web by Tools>Page Editor Options.  Changing the options will enable Expression Web to create html documents with a html 5 doctype.
• Like in DW, in split view, clicking in one view will place your cursor at the corresponding place in the other view.  This feature becomes more important as the size of the document increases.
• Like DW, Expression Web 4 can upload web pages to a server from within the application.
• View>Page>Snapshot displays the page as it would appear in Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 11.
• After entering an opening tag in code view, the ending tag is automatically entered.  This is a preference that can be changed in Tools>Page Editor Options>Auto Insert>Close tag.
• At the top right of the screen are icons which are similar to many of the icons in the Properties Panel in DW  - e.g. to make things bold, italic, do an unordered or ordered list, etc.  Sometimes these icons will disappear.
• Links - absolute links and relative links can be created by selecting the text you want to make into a link and choosing Insert>Hyperlink

CSS

• If you type a selector and then an opening brace, Expression Web will display an alphabetical list of CSS properties.  By default, the list of properties will be those in CSS 2.1 but one can change this to the CSS3 draft specification in Tools>Page Editor Options.  .After making this change, many CSS3 properties will appear as choices, but I expect some choices that appear are not part of the CSS3 specification currently..
• If you select a color property, e.g. color or background-color, Expression Web will display a color picker
and if you double click the "Pick Color" you can select a Color Picker which will match the color of a document on your screen (just like Dreamweaver can)

Revised: December 11, 2017.  Comments to William Pegram, wpegram@nvcc.edu