Our own Douglas Jay was fortunate enough to attend Mindsharp's Power End User training for SharePoint over the past four days in Philadelphia, and upon his return to the office this morning, he was good enough to share a bit of particularly blog-worthy learning with me. Doug asked if I knew how to publish a blog post directly from Word. What? You can do that?? As Doug learned from Mindsharp, yep, you sure can.
Of course, I had to know how one goes about doing so (which Doug was only too happy to share), then I had to try it out myself (which couldn't have been easier), and now I simply must blog the necessary steps. If you're a blogger who typically writes in Word (guilty as charged) and then pastes the results into your blog manually (with the occasional Word artifacts in need of cleanup), this feature is a super-sweet automated method of cutting out the manual portion of that transfer process, and letting Word take care of the publishing for you.
I'm using Word 2007, so your own path to the Publish feature may differ somewhat from the screenshots below, but so long as you're on WSS 3.0 (or MOSS), you should be able to publish to a blog directly from Word. To get started, open the Word doc containing your ready-for-publication blog entry, then click the Office button -> Publish -> Blog:
If you haven't already done so, clicking the Blog selection as pictured above will bring up a popup asking you to Register a Blog Account:
Note: If your blog is a SharePoint blog, Register a Blog Account basically means just providing the URL of your existing SharePoint blog, but you're hardly limited to just SharePoint blogs with this functionality. On the New Blog Account popup which appears when you click the Register Now button, you'll notice a Choose your blog provider dropdown:
The list of blog providers, in addition to SharePoint blog, currently includes options for: Windows Live Spaces, Blogger, Community Server, TypePad, WordPress, and Other.
Once you've successfully created an account for your blog, you'll notice that the Blog Post tab is now active in the Word 2007 ribbon, and you'll be prompted to [Enter Post Title Here] at the top of your document:
Once you've entered your Post Title, you're all set to publish. The dropdown options under the Publish button include Publish and Publish as Draft. Selecting Publish provides a handy confirmation of publication message, like so:
Since all I had in my document at the time I was running through these steps was a title and the filenames of the screenshots I was taking (along with a couple of notes to myself), it's not the fully-featured blog entry you're currently reading that I have to show, but here's what the end result of my publishing a blog via Word looked like:
Yep, it's just that easy. Pretty cool, huh?
More on SharePoint Blogs:
Posted
Feb 13 2009, 01:07 PM
by
John Anderson
John Anderson joined Bamboo Solutions as Manager of Content & Syndication in May 2008 after a 12-year career at AOL. New to SharePoint at the time of his hiring, John was tasked with creating a new blog for the just-launched Bamboo Nation community in which he would document his daily SharePoint learning process. Thus was born the end user-centric SharePoint Blank, for which John authored 200 posts within a year, and which he continues to write today. Today, John writes SharePoint Blank in addition to his responsibilities as Managing Editor at Bamboo and, while he learned much about SharePoint in his first two years, he gleefully celebrates the release of SharePoint 2010 and the reset button that the new platform represents for SharePoint Blank.