A while ago I read about blogging in Microsoft Word 2007 and was wondering if it really would integrate well. I use Type Pad for my blog (obviously) and have been curious about whether or not this would work. I must say that I'm impressed with it. This is the first time I actually tried it and published something. It's easy to set up and get going. It's clear as to where to put the title and selecting the category is easy. You can manage multiple accounts or blogs, which comes in handy for me because of my blog (this blog) and Jackson's blog. You can publish instantly or publish as a draft. What I like about it is that if you choose not to publish you can simply save a local copy of the document like you would anything else and open it later to finish or publish. The primary reason this matters is because you can draft something offline. You can always type something in many programs and then "cut and paste" from that program into the blogging tool but I really don't like to do that. Once you do that the formatting gets goofy and I want to spend as little time as possible tweaking things for aesthetics but I want my blog to look good at the same time. Just cutting and pasting from Word isn't the best idea. However, publishing directly from Word seems to work well.
Still, why does that matter? Often times I'll be working on a draft of a blog entry and I'll be somewhere where the wireless network connection is flaky, dropping me periodically or whatever. For example, a route table change can make me nervous because if my browser hangs and I'm in the middle of a post, I can potentially lose it. It's happened and it's frustrating. My work around when it looked as though I was going to lose my connection was to copy the text to the clipboard and then I can always paste it back if I had to start over. This didn't happen often but if I draft everything in Word, I don't have to worry about it all. It's surprisingly good.
this is an awesome review - I needed this for work, too. OOps, that was 2 weeks ago. ;-)
Posted by: steph W | May 30, 2007 at 02:10 PM