Technical Writer

Creating blogs in Word used to be a pain. Now it’s (relatively) painless.

A lot of tech writers are Word people. We create tables in Word where other people use spreadsheets. We write draft emails in Word, then copy and paste them into our mail program. Some of us even write our blogs in Word.

Talk to a web designer about creating html pages in Microsoft Word and they shudder. Create a page in Word and ask them to convert it to html and they’re likely to charge double. Because even though Word allows you to save a document in html format, if you ever look at the code behind it, it’s a mess. There is so much unnecessary junk, and every paragraph is styled, so if you want to implement your own style sheets you have to remove the style from every paragraph first. Not to mention Word’s normally-great feature of turning quotes into smart quotes, which you really don’t want in an html page.

But I’m a masochist. I thought I would try Microsoft’s blog template in Word 2007, just to see if things had improved.

It has. With a caveat.

If you save the file as html, you get the same ugly mess of html that you normally do. But if you publish your blog … voila. Beautiful clean code.

So, how does it work?

Before you start you need:

• Word 2007 (or 2010)
• A blog to post to. Some current valid blogs are:
  • Wordpress
  • SharePoint
  • TypePad
  • Blogger
  • Windows Live Spaces
  • Community Server.

I might also add that this is a WordPress blog, so I can comfortably state that this is what happens with WordPress, but cannot say it works the same way for other blogs.

First time around you will be asked to register an account

• Click on register an account
• Choose your blog provider from the drop-down list and click Next
• You are then asked to provide login details for your blog. WordPress asks for the Blog post url and the user name and password, for example, while Blogger asks for user name and password. You can also define where your pictures are uploaded to, if you include pictures in your blog
• Fill out the information required. If you check remember password, Word remembers this and you won’t don’t have to identify yourself when you post articles
• Click OK
• Microsoft then goes online to verify your login information is valid.

Assuming that your account is valid, when you are ready to create a post you:

• Open Word
• Click on the Office button and choose New
• Select the New blog post template and Create
• If you haven’t registered before you will be asked to register
• Put a title where it says [Enter post title here]. This is, literally, the title of the blog post
• Type your post under the line. You can work on it for days if you wish, saving it as normal Word document while you work
• When you are ready to post, click on Publish in the Blog Post ribbon. (You can change this to Publish as Draft by clicking below Publish and selecting the Publish as Draft option).

It’s as simple as that.

If you post to multiple blogs you can set up multiple accounts and just select which blog you are posting to when you create a new blog document.

In conclusion

Word is not an html editor, and if you do save files as html, they’re not optimal. A website created from non-adjusted Word html is still an ugly thing. But if, by preference or habit (or because of some of the program’s handier features like a good local dictionary and word count), you like to write your blog posts in Word, then I recommend it. It’s easy to use and the code is clean.