Nine days ago I published a short cryptic post that had a few people at work scratching their heads. Why I mention this is that it was wholly composed in Microsoft Word 2007, and published direct to the Stratify web site. Since then every post I’ve written has been published the same way.

How It Works

To be totally honest I upload it as a draft, then make my final adjustments direct in WordPress. This is not because of any deficiency in Word, it’s just the way I like to operate:

• Generally I write posts ahead of time & set them to become publicly visible at a future date. Easy to do in WordPress, but there’s no facility for this in Word. My work schedule doesn’t give me regular time every week, so I try to bang ‘em out when I can and let them publish over a period of time.
• I use the All-In-One SEO Pack plugin, which (among other things lets me set different titles, page slugs, and post headings). This lets me tinker with these important elements to see how search engines respond over time. Word doesn’t give me access to these extra fields, nor would I expect it to.
• Finally, I like to use the ‘More’ tag in my posts, which lets me put an extract on the home page and the full article on the post’s real page. This is a keyword density thing I aim for on the home page, so that a single recent post on one topic doesn’t dominate posts further down the page.

Here’s how simple it is. Fire up Word, click the Office Button, then select Publish>Blog. Here’s a screen shot:

This opens a new page with a field for the blog title and content. Options include the ability to choose a category, which Word does by querying your blog in real time. This screen shot shows the blog-specific commands, plus the first few lines of this post in draft:

Configuring Word To Access Your Blog

When I first discovered this capability and tried to use it, Word preceded my session with a quick configuration screen so it could access the Stratify blog. It’s now configured and I didn’t think at the time to grab any screen shots (I didnt even think it would work at all); however, when I click the Manage Accounts icon you get a good idea of the process. Here’s what I get after clicking Manage Accounts:

As you can see, I only have the one account set up at the moment. To set up another blog account to publish to (obviously the blog must exist and be operational, I click the New button:

I choose WordPress, ‘cuz that’s what I use, and click the Next button:

I enter ’stratify.com.au where it says on the first line (leaving all the other text intact), then my username and password where it says, the I select the Remember Password checkbox. Finally I click the Picture Options button:

The Stratify web site is hosted on our own server, which is the option I select. Click OK, and I can now publish to my blog direct from Word!

Neat, hey?

Why It Saves Me Time & Hassle

This capability saves me time. First, Word handles all the images uploads for me. The process to do this within WordPress is cumbersome, but now I don’t have to worry at all. It just works.

Second, I write posts in Word anyway. When I was running Word 2003 (up to a few weeks ago) I would write the post text, paste it into NotePad (to remove all the formatting codes), then paste it from NotePad into WordPress. I would then have to go through it and redo every line break, every bullet point or numbered list, and finally upload each individual image and insert it into the post.

What Could Make It Better

Like I said above, there are a few reasons why I still use the WordPress dashboard to make my final touches to each post. These are things that somehow could be integrated into Word to make the process a little easier.

Then, in true Microsoft fashion, there are things that are just plain dumb. Eagle-eyed readers will notice in the first screen shot on this post that I have the Search and Replace icons in my Quick Access toolbar (just to the right of the Office Button). These aren’t standard there; I had to put these in myself. ‘Cuz there’s no way, when entering or editing my blog post, that I can access these functions any other way. Frustrating, and (I hope) an oversight that will be corrected in Service Pack 1.

Next, and this is an operational thing I learned the hard way, is that each post you publish is somehow tied forever to the source document in Word. You can’t be pulling up an old post, changing the title and some text and images, then just Save As with another filename. Because when you publish it, it will overwrite the original post in your blog. I expect there is actually a way around this but I haven’t found it yet. The simple thing is just to start a new document for every new post, and past the content you want.

I like it. Thumbs up, Microsoft.