Word 2007 comes with the ability to add Quick Parts to your documents so you can quickly access frequently used blocks of text. As cool as this feature is, it would have lost a lot of its appeal if I had to use the mouse to access the Quick Parts from the ribbon menu which means I’d have to access them in 3 clicks, which really isn’t that Quick. What I wanted was the ability to insert it from a keyboard shortcut. At first this didn’t appear to be available but after a bit of digging I discovered it could be done (and without the use of a macro either). This blog post will take you through the process of creating a Quick Part and assigning a keyboard shortcut to it.
Creating a Quick Part
- Quick Parts are essentially blocks of commonly used text. To create a Quick Part, simply highlight the text that you want to access via the Quick Part menu and select “Save Selection to Quick Part Gallery…” from the Insert ribbon
- You should now see the “Create New Building Block” dialog. Fill in all the Relevant details and click “Ok”
- You have now saved your new quick part to the Quick Part Gallery. To use your Quick Part, you can simply select it from the Quick Part Menu
Or from the Building Blocks Organizer
Using either of these methods will insert the Quick Part at the current cursor location in your document.
Assigning a Keyboard Shortcut to your Quick Part
Once you have created your Quick Part, it can be rather inconvenient to continually have to go to the Quick Part menu to insert it. What you can do instead is assign a keyboard shortcut.
- Open up the “Word Options” dialog from the Office Button
- In the Word Options dialog, click on Customize and then in the right hand panel, click the Customize button next to the Keyboards Shortcut prompt
- In the Customize Keyboard dialog, in the left hand categories list box, scroll down and select “AutoText”, then in the right hand “AutoText” list box, scroll down to the name of the Quick Part you want to assign a keyboard shortcut to. Select the Quick Part and then select the “Press new shortcut key:” textbox and enter the shortcut key that you wish to assign to the Quick Part.
Once you have done that, click Assign to go back to the Word Options dialog.
As you can see, Quick Parts can be an extremely useful when you’re repeatedly using specific blocks of text, however to really harness the power of Quick Parts, assign a keyboard shortcut to them so they’re even more readily available.
In my last post I went through some of the benefits of posting to your blog via Word 2007. This article will take a more detailed look at how you can actually post to blogs via Word 2007.
Requirements
To be able to blog with Word 2007 you need 2 things
- Microsoft Word 2007
- An account with one of the supported blogging provider
The table below shows a list of the supported blogging providers that Word 2007 is compatible with and if they support direct image uploading.
Â
Create a New Blog Post
To create a new blog post in Word 2007, open Word, click on the office button and click “New”
You will then be presented with the “New Document” dialog. From here, select “Blank and Recent from the templates list and then in the main window double click on the “New Blog Post” template
You will now have a new document ready to create your new blog post.
Register Word with your Blog Account
Blogging from Word 2007 currently supports a number of blogging providers as listed in the table under requirements. In addition some providers will also allow you to directly upload pictures which is a key requirement for me as I always like to illustrate what I’m doing with pictures.
The blogging account I have is with my own WordPress server but the registration process is essentially the same for all of them.
- Click “Manage Accounts”
- You will then be presented with the “Blog Accounts” dialog. From here click “New”
- You will then be presented with the “New Blog Account” dialog. Here you will need to select your blog provider from the drop down list of blogs. I am choosing WordPress.
- You will now need to configure you account details and click “OK”
- Word will try and verify you’re information and if successful, will register your account in the account manager.
- You can now close your dialog and begin working on your post.
Insert a Category
I usually like to sort my blog posts into categories and Word 2007 makes this task easy as well.
- Click on the “Insert Category” button
- At the top of your post, an inline drop down box will appear with all the categories defined for your blog. All you need to do is select one and when you publish your blog, it will be published to that category on the server.
Edit Existing Posts
Another really cool feature is the ability to edit existing blog posts from within Word 2007. To do this all you need to do is:
- Click the “Open Existing” button
- Choose the account and post that you wish to edit and click “Ok”
Publishing your post
This really can’t get much easier. All you do is click the publish button and you’re done.
Conclusion
As you can see, setting up and publishing to a blog from Word 2007 is a snap. For my next article I’m going to look at setting up WordPress on Webhost4life, which is my hosting provider.
I have wanted to setup a blog for some time now, however I have always found the process of blogging to be cumbersome. The problem stemmed from the fact that you either had to be online to post or you had to use a third party client such as Windows Live Writer (which is still in beta but is free) or pay for something like BlogJet which is a very good application, but unfortunately for the casual blogger like myself, isn’t something I’m overly interested in purchasing.
This week however I was doing a bit of research and noticed that you could actually post blogs from MS Word. Suddenly, I was interested in blogging again.
Benefits of Blogging Offline
Now at first, you might not consider blogging offline to be a bit of a backward step to the whole process of blogging, however if you have ever done any serious blogging, I’m almost certain that you will have a workflow similar to the following:
- Type your post up in your favourite text editor
- Once completed, copy and paste it into your blogging software
- Apply headings and formatting
- Preview the post
- Post
Now this has never appealed to me as it’s always felt like a bit of a cumbersome way of doing things and quite frankly has meant I’ve never had an interest in maintaining a blog. With the ability to post to blogs from Word 2007, managing a blog suddenly becomes a whole lot more appealing for the following reasons:
- Publishing via a web browser is inferior
If you have done any sort of site admin or even content creation for websites, the general trend has been to use controls such as FreeTextBox or FCKEditor. Now these are great additions to websites and if you are using them to make small edits or add small bits of content then they are great, however have you ever tried writing a complete article with either of these? It simply doesn’t compare to using Word to get the job done.
- Create Publishable Content Offline
There are times when you might be at a hotel, stuck at an airport, travelling on the train or simply don’t have a net connection available but you have time to blog. Now you can always type it up in Word which you probably already do, but you’re still going to have to complete the other steps in the above workflow. But being able to publish from Word means you can also apply formatting and preview the post so that when your connection comes back, all you need to do is click publish and you’re done.
- You’re probably already writing your posts in Word anyway
As you probably noticed the first part of the blogging workflow involves typing up your posts in Word anyway. So if you’re already doing it, why not cut out the other steps and publish directly from Word anyway?
- Word is THE Swiss army knife of editors
No matter how fancy the online editors get, they’re never going to be better than Word. Spell-check, autocorrect, formatting, charts, clipart, tables, wordart, symbols, shapes and all manner of formatting and text manipulation options that we just take for granted with word are the reason you don’t type your posts online anyway.
- Ctrl + S
Nothing, and I repeat NOTHING is more annoying than losing work, which is another reason you probably use Word to type your posts in the first place. Nothing is more assuring than knowing that a simple Ctrl + S will save your work. On more than one occasion, working with an online blogging client has infuriatingly cost me time because of a timed out connection, or an accidental back button click which has meant that even if I have saved my word document, all my formatting is out the window forcing me to re-apply it.
- Publishing to Multiple Document Types
Publishing online is great, however publishing in Word means that I can save my documents to Word format after I’ve published them so I can back them up, or publish them to PDF (if you have a PDF generator installed) or any other format that Word supports, so I don’t have to maintain multiple versions of the document both online and offline, I simply open the post in Word and I can save it to any format I need.
- I don’t have to open my browser
In reality, you will actually need to do this to respond to, or moderate comments, but I don’t really have to if I don’t want to. I can post, edit posts, manage categories and even manage multiple accounts all from Word so as a blogger, I no longer even need to open my browser to blog anymore.
- Automatic Image Insertion (for some blogging platforms)
One of, if not the most single painful part of creating online documents is the need to upload images before you can include them in your document. It kills me every time I have to add a picture to my online documents and as such, I keep them to a minimum.
One feature that I absolutely love in Office is the ability to just copy and paste images or screenshots directly into the document without even having to save it first. I simply take the screenshot and press ctrl + v and I have an image in my document just like that. Now the cool thing about this is that when I publish a blog post in Word it will automatically publish the post for me. Admittedly it doesn’t do it for every blogging platform, but for mine (WordPress) it does and I have to say this feature alone would be enough to make the switch because quite simply, IT ROCKS!
Blogging from Word 2007 is a great addition to Word and I hope to see it advanced in future releases. I will be posting a follow up article on how to actually setup and blog using Word 2007 shortly.
