restore instructions using phpMyAdmin v. 2.8

The excellent instructions written out here:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Restoring_Your_Database_From_Backup
worked fine until my web server admin updated myphpAdmin to 2.8. The differences may not be critical to an above-average php user, but using my own limited knowledge, I tried using “Import”, but I get an error that such-and-such tables already exist.

So is there a way to use the tables of the backup file to just overwrite the existing tables?

thanks for everything,
Thomas