Oh, my god, I'm in love. At first blog post. I just installed Word 2007, which I bought at Amazon for a reasonable $90 (upgrade price). Right away I wanted to see if the blog publishing feature worked as promised.
It did. Appropriately, my first Word 2007 post was about Shakira's "Hips don't lie" Grammy performance last night. She's beautiful. So is Word's new blogging capability.
I write my posts in Word. I don't like to use TypePad's online editor. One glitch and all your writing can disappear. Plus, I like to have a backup of posts on my laptop.
But it's been frustrating to have to reformat the Word 2003-generated post after I copied it into the TypePad post editor. Italics, boldface, hyperlinks—all that stuff had to be manually put back in, because of some incompatibility between Word and the HTML TypePad expected (I'm vague on the technical details).
Now, though, what I write in Word is what appears on my blog. I can publish directly from Word 2007.
The setup was simple, once I figured how to get the blog post ball rolling (strangely, Word's Help wasn't much help in this regard—I discovered on my own how to click on the circle thingie in the upper left, then select "publish," followed by "blog").
Here's some set-up tips from another happy Word 2007 blogger.
This is going to change my blogging life. I'll have more time to cruise YouTube for Shakira videos, now that I don't have to fuss around so much with the TypePad text editor.
Except for photos, it seems. I had no problem inserting a photo into my post, but it was full-sized. It'd be nice to be able to use TypePad's thumbnail feature directly from Word. For now, it looks like I'll have to add photos from the online text editor, along with indenting quotes, perhaps.
"Well, let's try a test. Can I indent the left side of this fake quoted paragraph? Yes, I can. But whether it can be indented on the right side also, that is another question. But I can highlight it!"
Aside from its blogging feature, Word 2007 looks much improved in other ways. The "menus" now are tabs, laid out in a pleasing writer-friendly fashion. Microsoft does a lot of things wrong. With Word 2007, though, I give the often evil software empire a big thumbs up.
[Update later in the day: Well, here's one downside to Word 2007. If you buy it singly, like I did, you'll find that now you can't compose email messages in Word with Outlook 2003. You're confined to using the Outlook email editor, which doesn't do spell checking and some other stuff.
So, okay, I'll play the Microsoft game and fork out another $90 to get Outlook 2007, even though I didn't really want or need it. A bit frustrating, though.]
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