Testing blogging capabilities – Word 2010 versus Windows Live Writer 2011

I was wondering if Word 2010 would be a better blog editor than Windows Live Writer 2011 (WLW).

I constantly find myself using Word/Office keyboard shortcuts in WLW only to get annoyed that they don’t work.

This is really just a quick test to see the pros & cons and what features actually work. It may look a complete mess once I upload it!

Setting up Word 2010 to blog is really easy

1. File>New>Blog post
2. Select WordPress (or another host)
3. Enter Blog URL and user credentials

Pros (if they work!)

Picture Editing

Photo of me with background removal tool and artistic pencil effect

Smart Art

Word Art

This is written using a special font on my PC.
If Word is clever it will change it into a picture

Cons

• Only supports categories, not tags (can always do that after from WordPress dashboard)
• No support for WLW plug-ins
• No preview option/theme support

Time to publish and see what happens!

Update

OK, so after hitting the publish button I can see a few niggles but nothing major.

• The photo of me came out properly but before I published it was overlapping the right of the toolbar image.
• Smart Art and Word Art came out identically (converted to images).
• The custom font underneath the word art came out in the bigger size and displayed properly on my PC but returns to the default when viewed from a PC where it isn’t installed
• Basic formatting (like highlight, bold, italics, h1, h2) all worked

Overall, I think Word gives you a lot more power, not to mention better performance, than Windows Live Writer. It could be improved in the way it handles the whole blogging side of things (e.g. hyperlinkng to live articles, updating existing posts, source code editing). Ideally I would want it to have all the features of WLW (or vice versa!) but I can use the WordPress dashboard to easily fine tune things.

I think I will probably use it for all my posts for a while and see how it goes. If you’ve got it, flaunt it!