Blogging from Word 2007

As you’ll have gathered from a test post earlier, I now know how to blog from Word 2007 and it’s really, really nice. Of course my reference point is not that great but I do think the ability to use a very familiar tool (in this case Word) and just hit “Publish to Blog” is very slick. If you’ve installed Word 2007 Beta 2 and have yet to explore this feature, here’s a quick how to….

From the main menu, select “New….” and pick “New blog entry” from the options presented to you.

You will need to configure Word for your blog(s). If Word doesn’t prompt you for these details click the “Manage Accounts” button on the “Blog Post” tab in the Ribbon. Select “New” and choose your blog provider. You’ll need your username, password and the URL required to post to your blog (in the case of Community Server for example that might be: https://www.domain.com/metablog.ashx).

You’ll then be presented with a Word “blog” document with a content control to enter the post title and the rest of the document to enter your post text. When you’re done just hit the “Publish” button on the Ribbon (or “Publish as Draft”) and you’re good to go.

The end result is nice, clean XHTML (no superfluous markup - just enough to represent what you've written optimised for blogging) with CSS formatting (not 100% there yet but pretty close already). Lovely.

(and you can edit existing blog posts by clicking on the “Open Existing” button on the Ribbon)