Microsoft has decided to recognize the Blogging community in full force, by adding a robust blogging toolset to their flagship Office suite.
Setup
Setup is relatively simple. Bring up the new document window through the Office button and it’ll present the option for a new blog post. Click on it and you will be brought to a wizard which will allow you to setup the connection to your blog. With your credential and blog address you should be up and running within seconds. Adding other blogs is as simple as pressing the Manage Accounts button on the ribbon.
I’d like to note that contrary to traditional corporate mentality Microsoft acknowledges various blogging tools besides their own LiveSpaces, including WordPress, Blogger and TypePad, creating an automatic setup process behind the scenes which makes what should be considerably more technical and complicated quite simple indeed.
Posting
I’m particularly excited about being able to use Word as a blogging tool, primarily because it brings along it’s complete word processor tool set allowing me to write as I would regularly.
Creating a new blog post is almost exactly the same as writing anything else on word. Just go to new and select new blog post. If you only have one Blog (as I do) it wil create a blank post for you to fill if there are more than one you just choose and keep going.
Writing this blog post is practically identical to writing a regular Word document with slightly simpler tools probably taking into consideration the intrinsic limitations of writing for the web. Otherwise the experience is exactly the same. I can change fonts sizes and types, add headers and lists, even change text orientation. The process is so transparent and similar to the usual Word experience that it somewhat bugs me that there isn’t a tool to preview the HTML code that it’s going to use, for fine-tuning if nothing else.
Spell and grammar checking tools work exactly as they should and for us used to having them around it is absolutely fantastic. There are expanded blogging tools on the ribbon including:
- Publish; as Draft or just publish
- Home Page; to go straight to your blog
- Insert Category. I’m particularly pleased with how this works as it shows existing categories and lets you add a new one pretty much on the fly
- Open Existing; which will go through the published post list and let you edit any of them.
- Manage Accounts; to switch between blogs.
The one thing missing is a tool for adding tags. It might be hidden but it is not clearly evident as the others are.
Media
Edit: I am very disappointed in Word’s management of images. I had to eliminate all images before I was able to post, I got a notice that I did not have enough space on my server to update the images which was absurd as right now the image space alloted for this blog is at 100 mb.
I’ve posted an image of girl under a large archway rock formation. Cosidering that the much simpler moBlog uploaded a picture from my cel phone I’d be much disappointed if Word did not do the same.
The one difference is that instead of just referring to the image in some sort of HTML tag I see it in full size and can scale it dynamically, as I regularly would in any word document. I expect the uploaded image will be the size I scaled it down to. I can also add shapes, clipart and charts which might be useful at some other point:
Graphs and charts are brought from Excel Data sheets which I am sure will be particularly useful.
As before I see no options for video or audio, which is to be expected considering Word’s nature.
Conclusion
This is the most powerful blogging client I have tried so far and it blows most of WordPress’s tools right out of the water. I expect this will be my main blogging tool unless Live Writer is astonishingly better.
Edit: Considering the issue with image uploading I’ll probably end up using somthing else.
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