Phil Bernie Consulting

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:

1. Type your post up in your favourite text editor
2. Once completed, copy and paste it into your blogging software
3. Apply headings and formatting
4. Preview the post
5. 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:

1. 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.
   
   
2. 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.
   
   
3. 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?
   
   
4. 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.
   
   
5. 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.
   
   
6. 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.
   
   
7. 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.
   
   
8. 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.