I just bought a new PC – a nice big desktop model running on Windows 7. Of course it came with loads of free trial software, most of which (Norton) I uninstalled before doing anything else. I was also going to uninstall Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 – Open Office has served me well so far, and it’s free. But I’ve got a 60-day trial on Office, and being the software geek that I am, I thought I’d give it a try.
And I have to say, I’m going to buy this one. What a treat!
Microsoft – for once – makes it easy to set up your blog. Just enter your blog address, user name and password, and you’re ready to start publishing. You do need to make sure you enable XML-RPC remote publishing protocol on your blog. On a WordPress blog you’ll find it under Settings/Writing.
Uploading pictures is easy, as well, as long as you don’t want to do anything fancy with the file locations. I can’t seem to make it put my pictures in my image file, so for now I’m going to have to be content with using the WordPress media file locations. Microsoft also has a cool new tool (well, new to me, at least) for dealing with pictures: the Microsoft Office Picture Manager. It’s great for doing fast edits like cropping and resizing, without taking the time to open a full graphics package like Photoshop. It also remembers shortcuts to all your photo libraries, so if you’re like me and you keep pictures for your blogs in separate folders, Microsoft Office Picture Manager lets you see them all in one place.
Of course the best part of using Word 2007 to publish blog posts is that you have all the features of a complete word processor right at your fingertips. Powerful spell check, grammar correction (be careful with this one!), and formatting is super simple with Microsoft Word. The only thing I found lacking in this area is the ability to apply heading styles. For me, that’s not such a big deal, since I like to publish my posts in draft form and go into my WordPress dashboard for final clean-ups anyway.
One other thing missing from the Word to blog interface is tagging. Word 2007 does support categories with a drop-down list, but there doesn’t appear to be any way to add tags.
Overall, I’m looking forward to giving Word a shot at handling my blog posting needs. If you’re interested in checking it out for yourself, Microsoft offers a 60-day trial on Microsoft Office Professional. That’s probably way too much software for you – I know it is for me – but it will give you the core products like Word and Excel as well as all that other stuff. When you’re ready to buy, Amazon has the best price on Microsoft products.
I have MS Office Professional, but I also bought MS Office Home & Student because I wanted OneNote (which didn’t come with Professional). At the time Home & Student was on sale for $50 and to buy OneNote separately cost more than twice that. So I bought Home & Student just for that. While you’ve got that trial you need to try OneNote as well, Cindy. I couldn’t do without it now. And make sure you try the “clipping” feature it has.
I didn’t know that you could do all that blogging stuff with Word! Will have to give that a try. Thanks for the heads-up!
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You know, I have OneNote, and it looks *really* interesting – from a geeky-software-lover perspective, and I’ll probably investigate it further. Right now I’m loving EverNote, mostly because it syncs via the ‘net so I can use it across computers and on my BlackBerry. Maybe once I’m more established in my new office and firmly tied to a single computer I’ll give OneNote another try.