Using Microsoft Word as a Blogging Environment
Posted on August 16th, 2005
I heard today that Blogger release an addon for Microsoft Word that lets you compose and publish blog entries. I had that idea earlier this year! But sadly I never got around to doing anything with it.
My version of the idea was a little different from what Blogger did-- I figured you'd compose an entry in a Word document, save it, and then send or upload that file to a server where it could be processed. Maybe that processing would involve transformation to XML and intelligent extraction of the content by walking through the XML structures. Maybe that would be more crude, the equivalent of an automated File->Save as HTML and then a run through HTML Tidy to clean out all the gunk.
Blogger's approach is more one-stop-shopping. You write an entry, press a button, and the text you've just written is wisked over to the open arms of your nearest Blogger server. It isn't clear whether complex markup is supported (tables, embedded graphics, things like that) but you can get a list of existing entries and pull them into Word. So there's a push aspect as well as a pull aspect.
I suppose there's still room to do the equivalent with Open Office, assuming the same kinds of capabilities were available. Somehow I don't think I'll ever get around to investigating.
It's a wonder no one has done something like this before for a word processor. Given the popularity of blogging, it's ironic that the composition interface for most people is a multi-line text box on a web page. Kind of like writing your next important document in Notepad-- simple to the point of being pitiful.