I have been enjoying using the new Office.
Full disclosure: I got my first year of Office365 for free. I took part in the preview and genuinely enjoyed it. I said as much on Twitter and was rewarded by the Office team with a year’s subscription at no cost. That’s been great for me – as a new teacher without a huge budget for tech, having the service free for a year has been incredibly helpful. But as I use it, I’m more and more aware of the fact that I’m not taking advantage of its features.
One of the things I didn’t play with is the WordPress integration. Until now. The WordPress editor is fine, but there are two things that drive me nuts about it. One, it’s browser-based. The experience of pressing backspace and accidentally navigating away from a page is a pain many bloggers share. It’s become less and less of a problem, but it’s still something I feel that I have to be conscientious of.
Offline editing is another thing. I can and usually do create my posts in Word anyway, because it’s a cleaner experience than WordPress. Less busy. I don’t need to bother myself with all the plugin management, etc. Now, though, I realize that the integration is actually pretty cool. It took about four seconds to set up my self-hosted WordPress site in Word, and minutes later I have a post.
It seems like the formatting is maintained pretty well too, and gives me the easy ability to add in-line pull-quotes like the one above. It uploads WordArt as images, which isn’t ideal, but with a little bit more experimentation I’m sure that I’ll find other ways of going about it that work better for me, that work better with the way I want to structure the site.
This is literally what this post looks like in Word. Minus this picture. No image-ception happening here.
It’s insane that I didn’t realize how great this is until now.
I like it.
I wasn’t aware this was possible, very cool! I have been looking into a comprehensive solution for clients that want to manage their blog offline and this looks like it might be a great fit.
I’m going to play with it more and follow up once I experiment with some other ideas. It won’t work for all my needs (for example, it seems like posting podcasts won’t work with Office, and any plugins I want to activate with shortcodes won’t work), but for written stuff and managing images, it’s pretty much perfect.