US 7,539,944 B2
Importing data from a source document into a destination document
Matthew Charles Gauthier, Redmond, Wash. (US); Yaniv Inbar, Bellevue, Wash. (US); Tyson Murray, Maple Valley, Wash. (US); Wentao Chen, Sammamish, Wash. (US); Andy Verprauskus, Seattle, Wash. (US); and Richard Jacques, Kirkland, Wash. (US)
Assigned to Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, Wash. (US)
Filed on Feb. 18, 2005, as Appl. No. 11/61,904.
Application 11/061904 is a continuation of application No. 09/819176, filed on Mar. 27, 2001, granted, now 6,948,134.
Prior Publication US 2005/0177573 A1, Aug. 11, 2005
Int. Cl. G06F 3/00 (2006.01)
U.S. Cl. 715—748  [715/739] 9 Claims
OG exemplary drawing
 
1. A computer readable medium accessible to a computing system and on which is encoded a computer program for executing a computer process for importing data contained on a source document into a destination document, wherein the destination document is displayed within an associated application program having a user interface, the process comprising:
receiving a location for the source document by way of user input through a user interface region, the user input comprising a location identifier associated with a storage location for the source document, wherein the source document is a web page and the location identifier is a Uniform Resource Locator (URL);
accessing the source document at the identified location;
displaying the user interface region as part of the user interface of the application program running the destination document;
examining source code for the source document to identify table objects contained thereon by scanning for <TABLE> tags included within hypertext markup language of the source code for the source document;
indicating in the user interface region external data within the accessed source document that is available for insertion into the destination document by placing a plurality of icons, each icon of the plurality of icons being placed proximate one of the identified table objects;
receiving user input selecting at least a portion of the indicated external data, wherein receiving the user input comprises receiving a selection of one or more of the plurality of icons positioned proximate the external data and having a zIndex set to a maximum allowable value that corresponds to a highest layer in the source document; and
invoking an import command to paste content associated with the selected one or more of the plurality of icons into the destination document, wherein the destination document is a spreadsheet document and the selected portion of external data comprises at least one table object having a plurality of data fields.