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I must say that I absolutely love the entire Office 2007 suite!! Office 2003 was a good product, everything worked as you would expect (except for Outlook which a bloated piece of crap) – but everything in Office 2007 is improved and makes productivity so much more efficient! Here is one example, I created this very post through Word 2007 – from the first keystroke to publishing, I never opened my browser! And the best thing about it, Word 2007 actually produces clean HTML – unlike Word 2003 which sticks in its own markup language, which creates more info for the browser to have to deal with and ultimately ignore, creating longer page load times.

Why Bother

You get an offline editor that has fantastic spelling and grammar checking!

Info

Setting up Word to publish was very easy and will work with Windows XP and Vista and it only takes a few dialogs to set it all up! Also, you can have more than one blog set up under multiple blog systems. The following are supported:

• Windows Live Spaces
• Blogger
• SharePoint blog
• Community Server
• TypePad
• WordPress
• Other

Setup

1. To start, click the round Office button, Publish, then Blog.
2. Since this is the first time were setting this up, click the Register Now button in the Register a Blog Account dialog.
3. In the New Blog Account dialog, select WordPress from the drop down menu.
4. In the New WordPress Account dialog, you get to fill in all of the important information. In the Blog Post URL, fill in your blog’s address; if you’ve installed WordPress somewhere other than your site’s root, then you need to specify that here. Say you’ve installed WordPress at: http://example.com/blog then the URL would be http://example.com/blog/xmlrpc.php.Now enter your username and password. These would be the values that you use to log into WordPress!If you would like Word to upload pictures for you, we can set that up by clicking the Picture Options button.

   

5. The Picture Options dialog is a little tricky, so pay attention! You can choose to have Word publish images to directly to you blog provider (think a wordpress.com account) or to your server (if you or a host is serving your site). I’m hosting this site, so I chose the My own server option^[1]. In the Upload URL text box, type in the address as so: ftp://username:password@URL.com/folder. So, let’s say that this is your information:
   • WordPress Username: Bob
   • WordPress Password: monkey123
   • WordPress URL: boblovesmonkeys.com
   • Folder: images

   Then you would type: ftp://bob:monkey123@boblovesmonkeys.com/images - notice the colon between the username and password and that there is not “http://” in the URL.

   And the source would read: http:// boblovesmonkeys.com/images

   If you upload your images to the default location (from within posts), you can set that up as: ftp://user:pass@URL.com/full/path/to/wp-content/uploads
   And the Source URL would be http://URL.com/wp-content/uploads.
   

6. Click OK and you’re all done!

Create Your First Blog Entry

Now, you can see the Ribbon has changed to blogging mode! You can Publish, Publish as draft, Insert your categories (yep, it will download all of your categories!) ^[2], Open existing posts, set up new blogs and even insert HTML objects like pictures, links, charts and so much more! You can even create drop shadows and other image effects!

After you are done, you can simply click the Publish button and your post will be live!

Options

If you want to take advantage of WordPress’s Time Stamp feature, publish the post as a draft and then go online and set the time and publish it from there!

^[1] The problem with having Word upload your images, is that it names the images in this format: date_postid_description.ext. For example an image would be called 070207_Word_1.gif and Word tries to optimize the images before uploading them and can make them look too lossy. It would be nice to be able to configure the image quality, but you can’t have it all!

^[2] To set more the one category, click the Insert Category button again.

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