Word 2013 as blog post editor

Writing a blog post can be quite time consuming. Especially the ‘formatting’ part of a blog post. When I started blogging here, I was a strong believer of the online editor from WordPress. Just because it’s so easy to use. But there are other possibilities like using Word 2013.

Word can easily connect to your WordPress (or some other provider like Blogger, SharePoint blog…) engine and will provide you everything you need to format your blog post. To start, just open Word 2013 and select the ‘Blog Post’ template. There you will have the option to register/create an account. In my case, I selected WordPress as provider (even though it’s self hosted!)

Next step is to enter the URL to your blog engine added with xmlrpc.php (which is the endpoint that Word will use to publish your blog post). You also need to provide your username and password (the one you use to login to wp-admin). On that screen, you can also change some ‘Picture Options’. In my case, I used the built-in WordPress Picture Provider.

In fact, that’s all you have to do, you can start typing, adding images, play with your formatting. When you’re ready, click on the ‘Publish’ button on the top left side of the ‘Blog Post Ribbon’. You can also ‘Publish as draft’ to be sure that your post is already saved on WordPress. Using the ‘Open Existing’ button, you will see a list of your existing posts like:

To end this post, I will give you some of my personal pros and contras about using Word 2013 as Blog Post Editor. Good luck if you will try it yourself.

Pro:

• Saved as .docx file into my SkyDrive
• Easy image formatting
• Spell checker from Word is amazing (as non-native English speaker) comparing to the in-browser experience

Contra:

• No “Align full” formatting possible
• Code formatting = no-go
• Post needs some modifications after publishing (tags, SEO related things…)
• No auto-draft save