Post to your blog directly from Word

I’m insanely pleased to have discovered this, even though I don’t actually blog very often. But I could have used it in jobs I’ve had in the past, and may even be tempted to blog more now!

Did you know you can post to a blog directly from Microsoft Word?

This is exciting for a number of reasons.

First, Word has a lot of formatting junk in it. Generally that means it’s not a good idea to cut and paste from Word directly into your web page. You can end up with a lot of messy html that mucks up your page.

That means you often end up creating your content in Word and then pasting it into your web page as plain text. Then you have to format it again (for example, italics and hyperlinks), add in the images and so on – extra work!

So, for a start, not having to go through that plain text stage saves you time.

Second, it’s just cool! Word can integrate with certain blog publishing services (including WordPress but quite a few others too) so you can publish blog posts directly from Word.

You need to link your blog page, which is quite simple. And then you start your blog post in Word by selecting New > Blog post (see above). Yep, I’d never looked at it before either.

You get a new document that looks a bit different to the usual ones, and that is directly connected to your blog – even to the extent that you can choose categories for the post from a pull-down list from your blog (see below).

The Word functions are a bit restricted, but as you can see in the image above add-ins such as PerfectIt are still there. You can create your post in Word, format it beautifully, add in your images and create a beautiful final product. And then, with a simple click of the Publish button at the top left, your post is up on your blog; formatted, images in your media library and all.

One click!

Actually, I suggest taking the safe route and selecting Publish > Publish as Draft. That way you can do a final check in your blog before you hit publish; for example, you may want to insert a ‘Read more’ line, add some tags or schedule it for publishing later.

I must admit, thinking that this might help streamline the process of uploading a whole newsletter (as a not so random example), I’ve tried to post a really big blog post without success. I need to explore more to find out how much I can do.

For more detailed instructions on getting yourself set up to blog from Word, this article by Cindy Grigg on Lifewire is a great place to start.

And there’s more information at Microsoft’s Help with blogging in Word.

This article was originally published in the Editors Victoria June 2018 newsletter (link updated to IPEd archive, members only).

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