I'm preparing to present at a Windows Vista Launch and recently rebuilt my machine with Windows Vista. In a future post I will blog about my experience with Vista. For now, I want to discuss a feature of Microsoft Word 2007 that I just discovered and absolutely love.

I hadn't blogged in a while and someone asked me to blog about installing assemblies into the GAC. In the past I had used Windows Live Writer, a free tool from Microsoft which makes composing blog entries very easy. Since my machine had recently been rebuilt and I had not blogged in a while, I had not installed Live Writer. When I created a new document in Word I discovered that there was a new entry on the menu for creating a blog post so I decided to investigate further.

It turns out that the Word team nailed this feature. Creating and maintaining a blog, for the supported blog providers, is a snap. Word's blog template handles formatting the text, headings and pictures that you add to the blog entry. In addition, if you define a "Picture Provider", Word will handle uploading and naming any pictures that you paste into your blog entry. You have all of Word's rich features at your disposal for formatting text. Not to mention the fact that you can spell and grammar check each post.

In order for this to work, you must define a blog account for Word where you provide the information about you blog and picture provider.

  1. Start by creating a new Blog Account and selecting the blog provider from the drop down.


    Shown is the list of Blog Providers supported out-of-the-box. You could visit Microsoft's site to see if support for more providers has been added. At Neudesic we are using Community Server.
  2. You then provide information about the Blog Post URL, User Name and Password.
  3. If you are going to be pasting pictures into your blog entries, click on Picture Options to define information about a Picture Provider.

    In my case, Neudesic has a network share where we post downloadable files, including pictures. The source URL is the address used to retrieve the images for display in you blog.
  4. Having completed these simple steps Word will connect to your blog server and will allow you to select from a list of blogs. Choose your blog and start blogging!
  5. When you are done writing a blog entry, press the Publish icon that is on the ribbon. It couldn't be easier.


Adding a feature to Word 2007 to make writing blogs a simple task is enough but there is more. Word also gives you the ability to open and edit existing blog entries and define categories.

As I mentioned, Word 2007 makes blogging easy. I just love this new feature of Word 2007!