Blogging from Word?

I’m playing with the trial version of Office2007. Yeah, I know. I’m Mr. OpenOffice.org, aren’t I.

Well, I heard tell that Micro$oft might have finally gotten Office right. If nothing else, they’ve certainly improved things. One nifty feature is that you can write blog entries from within M$Word. You can see a screen grab made while typing this post to the left. It’s not quite as slick as Windows Live Writer, but it is certainly a handy function.

In the past, you’d spend a long time writing something in Word, and then decide, “Hey, that might be a good blog entry.” So, to blog it, you’d have to copy and paste the text into Notepad, and the copy and paste it into your blog editor so that there was no chance that all the crazy Word formatting codes would end up screwing up your blog post. And then you had to go back and reformat the document. Cool.

What first caught my eye, though, was PowerPoint. At last night’s CMPG meeting, we saw a presentation prepared with the new PowerPoint. All I can say is, “WOW!” I mean, PowerPoint was pretty decent before, but there were many other programs that could do as good or job or better. Last night’s presentation looked truly professional, to say the least. In fact, it looked like good television!

Most of the rest of the Office Suite applications have received numerous upgrades, with the notable exception of Publisher. It still looks much as it did in the 2003 version – and all the versions before that. I suspect that Publisher won’t be around for a whole lot longer. Many of its functions have been added to Word, and significantly improved upon.

The Home and Student version of Office does include an interesting application called OneNote. OneNote is a kind of electronic catch-all that allows you to make all sorts of free-form written or visual notes, store them away for easy retrieval, and even use them in other Office documents.

The pricing structure has been greatly improved, too. MSOffice Home and Student Suite version retails for only $150. That’s still $90 more than Works 9, but then, the Office applications are far more powerful. And, while works does include a database function (the Office Home and Student Suite doesn’t include Access), Works doesn’t have a PowerPoint equivalent. New PCs from many manufactures are coming with some sort of trial version of Office pre-installed now, and it’s well worth looking into. I guess I’ll be re-saving all those OpenOffice files in Microsoft format …