Microsoft Word keeps getting more and more intelligent through each release, extending the powerful capabilities of the Microsoft Office suite.
One of the major advantages of Word over other word processors is the integration with other Microsoft Products.Ever worked with coworkers on a Word document located on a SharePoint site or on SkyDrive and noticed the "<Name> is also editing this document"?
This feature is great for collaborative work; we used it often at Technical University of Denmark when we were writing repots together as a Team and in Microsoft, the usage haven't shortened.
Since I'm now a Microsoft Dynamics 'guy', the integration with the office suite, won't be lead of this post. The ability to export data to (both Word and) Excel is really a powerful thing! However, the feature I'm dedicating this blogpost to, is the feature of writing blogposts within Microsoft Word, utilizing Words powerful spellchecking, Graphics and styling capabilities; it's just awesome!
With Word 2007 (I believe), Microsoft added this functionality, though I've never really looked into it, since I would think it would only be able to post to a very limited number of blogs, using some Microsoft API;
I was wrong! Microsoft have added some standard blog types, like SharePoint, Blogger etc. but also WordPress which is written in PHP is supported "out of the box" without any special configuration! However since I no longer use WordPress, this really didn't do it for me, until I looked closer at the "Other" option.
Microsoft supports the "MetaWebLog" API, which any decent blogging software should support; at least BlogEngine.net does and this was great news for me!
Setting it up took approximately 30 seconds. Start up word, select the "Blog Post" template, get the "New Blog Dialog", select otherand type<url of blog>/ metaweblog.axd, type your username and password and you're done!Word has now become your powerful blogpost editor, with the ability to use rich styling, editing of pictures and even set categories of your posts!
I must say, I'm pretty pleased and amazed of this feature and I'll definitely use it onwards instead of writing the blogposts in my browser using the feature-poor editor in BlogEngine.net!
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