Blogging from Word 2007

re: Blogging from Word 2007

Lauren Smith — Fri, 12 May 2006 18:11:36 GMT

I'm torn on this. I understand that Word is supposed to be about publishing, and blogging is a form of publishing. OTOH, blogging is web publishing, and the tools to access the web are much different than an offline application like Word (up to this point).

I'm sure that the feature is going to be really cool and things will work better than expected, but I just get a strong feeling of cognitive dissonance when trying to reconcile the workflow of opening up Word to work on a post which will be ultimately destined for the web.

Now if they componentized it and made it accessible as a control through IE, that would be very cool.

re: Blogging from Word 2007

BrianJones — Fri, 12 May 2006 18:24:01 GMT

Hi Lauren, I think a number of people have that view.
There is a bit of a switch that you need to make in order to think positively of the value that a client side application can bring to web publishing. We went through similar issues when we moved over to using Word as the default editor for Outlook e-mail.
Now in Outlook 2007, the Word engine is actually used both for composing and viewing all e-mail messages.
Word is the best document authoring tool out there, and it only makes sense to give people all that power when they are editing these new types of documents. The meaning of a document is definitely changing, and Word is adjusting to account for that.
Give it a try when the Beta comes out and let me know what you think. :-)

-Brian

re: Blogging from Word 2007

Lauren Smith — Fri, 12 May 2006 19:12:34 GMT

I'm looking forward to trying it out. Done right, it could be awesome. Done wrong, and it could end up being another feature that falls into the 80 side of the 80/20 Pareto rule.

I think what really helped users accept Word as an email editor was the fact that it was essentially seamless with Outlook. You hit Ctrl-N to create a new email and without any extra action, you got this row of toolbars at the top. Add to that that dragging something like an Excel spreadsheet selection is something that users want to be able to do and Word's excellent OLE support to handle exactly that, and suddenly you've got this really high-powered email editor all for the price of nothing (maybe hitting a checkbox if it wasn't set automatically).

What is the price to use Word as your blog authoring tool? Now, it's launching Word and copying the final text to the blog's input box (and maybe whatever additional formatting is necessary, Joe Friend touched on this a bit in his post).

Anyway, all this is just speculation and I'm not really that pessimistic about the feature. As was pointed out in the other blog entry, the workflow for many bloggers is already incorporating Word as a proofreader and formatter. Blogging directly from the application itself allows them to be just that little bit more productive.

Next up, make me more productive in my comment making! :-)

re: Blogging from Word 2007

BrianJones — Fri, 12 May 2006 19:31:21 GMT

I hear you on the comments :-)

The blog tool will still be pretty rough in Beta 2, but the goal is that it's as seamless as Wordmail. You have a thought, so you write it down in Word, and then just press a publish button and it's automatically posted for you.

re: Blogging from Word 2007

tom — Sun, 14 May 2006 22:34:14 GMT

http://www.arcon5.com/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&p=785
word 2007

The new features are quite extensive! Microsoft really are pushing the boat out!

re: Blogging from Word 2007

rasx — Mon, 15 May 2006 21:25:18 GMT

I'm almost sure that Joe Friend is not using an XML-centric solution to the "Blogging problem" in Word. So I built this little guy called CleanXHTML for Word 2003:

http://songhaysystem.com/document.php?doc=40

When I say "clean" I mean that CleanXHTML output conforms to W3C standards. My tool only supports cutting and pasting (no XML-RPC support yet) but CleanXHTML works at the Range level not at the document level. Brian Jones is an inspiration behind this tool so this is a great opportunity to express my appreciation for his appreciation of XML.