Tuesday, August 30, 2005

blogger for word review

Blogger for word is a 2 mb download available from http://buzz.blogger.com/bloggerforword.html. You need Windows 2000 or XP for this word add-in to work, and at least word 2000. Once you download and install it, a toolbar appears in MsWord, with four basic buttons, blogger settings, open post, save as draft and publish. The settings basically stores your username and password so that you don’t have to repeatedly log in to use the other functions. Open post allows you to open any previous post for editing directly in the word window. You get a drop down menu with different blogs (if you have more than one blog) and a scrolling window which shows the previous fifteen posts from which you can select any one to edit. There seems to be no place from which you can choose to display more than fifteen posts, so I think you are allowed to edit only so much in word. You can also save your work as a draft on any of your blogs, which is a simple process of two clicks, one to select your blog and another to send your text. You can publish the post after selecting the blog using the publish button. Also, the software automatically generates a title (with the first three words) for your blog which can be edited before the post is published.
On the downside, even simple text formatting like font and color do not show up. You can only blog basic text using blogger for word. Also, tables don’t show up in the blog, and images show up with a “[image placeholder]” in the blog. When you try blogging images or tables, a window pops up saying that “this is not yet possible” and asks if you want to continue posting anyway. This might mean that future versions of blogger for word might allow for formatting to show up in the blog. As of now, however, there is no real benefit of using blogger for word over the blogger website beyond the fact that you can easily blogged saved documents instead of going through the copy+paste routine.
This is an innovative idea but needs more capabilities before it can be of any real utility.

1 comment:

Jugular Bean said...

Yeah, going by your last post, it's quite useless :D