Microsoft Word add-on for Blogger

Deborah reveals the finer details of the new Blogger plugin for Microsoft Word that allows Blogger users to publish directly from inside Microsoft Word. Once the add-in is installed, three additional buttons appear on a user’s Word toolbar: Publish, Open Post, and Save As Draft. These allow users to publish new posts directly from the text document, open and edit their last 15 posts in Word, and save posts without publishing them.


Google has warned that users who don’t have the Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 Rollup, the latest Windows Installer, the latest Office Service Packs may have difficulty installing and using the plug-in. Users also may encounter problems with the plug in if they are running Outlook and Word at the same time (if Word is their e-mail editor), Google warned.


"After typing out a post, I clicked Save as Draft. Blogger for Word promoted me for my account and password and then loaded the post quickly and correctly," Gina Trapani blogged.


"We designed this for maximum compatibility with older version of Word going back to Word 2000 on Windows 2000," says Jason Shellen, Pyra Founder and Google product manager, on his Web log. "That means that this is a very simple toolbar, but once you try round-tripping a document (publish, view on the Web, make some changes, view again) you will see that it is powerful as well… The trade-off was that we couldn’t support images, tables, or some of the wackier formatting in Word."