Solo Technology

Here’s an interesting item: Microsoft Office 2007 (link is to beta signup) will offer bloggers the ability to author posts from Word or OneNote. Here’s the applicable Word blog post and an amusing quote:

Stop, don’t jump to the end of this post to push the comment button yet. I’m not an idiot. I’m not endorsing you commit HTML suicide. If you’ve ever written a post in Word 2003 or before and then copied and pasted the text into your web browser you know what I’m talking about. Sure you can do it, but you have to run one of those HTML clean up tools so that your posts don’t look mangled. Even then the HTML is not tight and clean, right?

Amen brother. one of the very common things we deal with over at WordPress.org Support is folks with “odd or mysterious” formatting issues. Amazing how often a quick peek at the source reveals MS Word’s html formatting (such as it is). However, it is understandable why folks want to compose posts in Word: Familiar interface, spell checking, grammar check are all things easy to get used to. But cutting and pasting from Word directly into WP’s wysiwyg editor is just a disaster.

So check out that blog post for some more information and even some pictures. If you’re an office user and a blogger this could be nifty.

From the comments on that post, I found this OneNote blog post. A bit of a “us too!” but still… interesting for the OneNote fans.

You should check out the entry on Joe’s blog for the details because all I get to tell you is that you can now use “File/Send to/Blog” or right-click on a selection or page in OneNote, choose “Blog This”, and whatever you did that to will be sent over to Word2007 ready for you to categorize, edit, and publish. This includes embedded pictures.

A couple hours after I found these two articles, Slashdot put up a post on the same topic. The MS haters had a field day in the comments, but that’s pretty much to be expected there if they wish to belong to the herd.

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