By now, you’ve probably heard the news that Office 2007 beta 2 is publicly available for download. (If you hadn’t heard the news, then you can download it from here). Unless you’d been living under a rock for the past year or so, you have also probably heard about all the new UI (User Interface) changes in Office 2007 and how it is supposed to make working with Office easier, faster and more intuitive. I’ve just downloaded and installed beta 2 and while I can’t yet comment on how good an experience the UI is, the build of Word that is included with Office 2007 has a not-so-much mentioned feature that I’m excited about :) So what’s this feature? The ability to blog directly from within Word!

I discovered the feature quite by accident since I don’t believe I saw any mention of this feature in any of the early beta review articles. But once I found it, I was surprised to discover that they had put a lot of thought into how things worked from within Word. So let me give you a little taste of what the blogging feature is all about and you can judge for yourself if this is something that you’d want to have/use.

First, a look at the main interface in Word 2007 and a quick list of new UI elements that I will refer to in the article:

Now, if you want to write a blog entry in Word 2007, you’ve got to go click on the MS Office Button – this is where the standard File menu items from previous versions of Word (and then some) went to :) Here’s a screenshot of what the new MS Office menu looks like when you navigate to the blog option:

When you click on the Blog option, it will open up a new Word window. This window is different from normal word editing windows in that it has a separate location for the post title. Not only that, if you haven’t set up any blogging accounts till now, it will also prompt you to create a blogging account with an established blogging services like MSN Spaces, Blogger, SharePoint etc. or to provide the details for your own blogging server as long as it supports Atom or MetaWeblog APIs. The other difference in this new window is the ribbon bar – instead of the standard ribbon bar with nine tabs that you see in the first screenshot, you get a new blogging ribbon bar which has only three tabs:

And here’s how the document window itself looks:

If you have multiple blogging accounts defined (you can use the Manage Accounts button on the ribbon bar to Add/Modify blogging accounts), then the Account selector appears just under the entry title. You can select any of your defined blogging accounts from there and make your entry. Making the entry itself is as easy as typing out a normal document using Word :) After you’re done typing, all you have to do is click Publish on the ribbon bar or click the little arrow next to Publish to get the option to also publish an entry as a Draft. That’s about it. Happy blogging!

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