Posting to Blogs from Microsoft Word 2007

Most people who tried Office 2007 are surprised by the new features and changes to the suite. It is now a common opinion on the internet that while Vista is a heavily bloated OS, Office 2007 brings in a refreshing and welcome change (I am yet to test Vista Beta 2, so my opinion may be different. I am waiting for that one mail from Microsoft). One of the new features in Word 2007 is posting to the blog service providers directly from within Word. The following service providers are supported in the beta – MSN Spaces, Blogger, SharePoint and any other blog which supports Atom or MetaWebLog api. So all you do is select New -> New Blog Entry. The first time when you do this, you are asked a few questions on your account details like user id, password

and URL to upload your images. For blogger, image upload is not supported. Click on publish once you are done with editing! The advantages of using Word for posting to blogs are obvious: Built-in spell check, ability to post to multiple blogs easily, variety of formatting options, ability to work off-line for large posts etc., I wish I had this tool when I wrote the largest post in this blog: My Krome iQ 700 review.

Beta quirks: This seems to be a late-breaking feature in the beta. It is almost unusable if you try to upload images. Several times I enountered a mysterious dialog box asking for my user-id and password for the blog. Even if you give details, it strangely reappears, leaving you with the only option of killing Word through task manager.

PS: The default font in Office 2007 seems to be Calibri. Looks gorgeous.