Blogging from Word 2007

I installed Office 2007 Beta 2 today. I was reluctant to install previous versions of Office 2007 because this is my main productivity machine and I really don’t fancy going back to having two computers again.

The first thing I made sure worked was Outlook. After I tinkered for a couple minutes to see what new features are there, I saw that you could add RSS subscriptions. Thank goodness, because I was getting random explosions from the My.Blog Outlook sample using Outlook 2003. It will be nice to have an aggregator again without having to manage yet another program. I love consolidating functionality into Outlook, because then you get the goodness of moving items to tasks, scheduling items based on content received in emails, etc.

I ran through some of the blogs in the blogs.msdn.com feed, and noticed Joe Friend posting on blogging from Word 2007. A clean HTML generation? Oh man… I gotta try that, especially if there is no post-processing needed to remove all the verbose metadata in the HTML anymore.

And just to prove it… this blog entry brought to you by Word 2007.

Steps I did to make it work:

  1. Click the “file” icon, choose “New”
  2. Choose the “New Blog Entry” item
  3. It prompts you with configuration data for your blog provider. Since blogs.msdn.com (and weblogs.asp.net, and geekswithblogs.net, etc) run on CommunityServer, I chose that as the provider.
  4. It prompts you for your username and password, as well as a post URL. For blogs.msdn.com, that is https://blogs.msdn.com/metablog.ashx.
  5. Write the post in the kick-butt new Word 2007
  6. Click the “Publish” button in the Blog Post toolbar group.

Sweet.