How to Blog using OneNote and Office 2007

Posted under Tools

One of the cool features of Office 2007 and OneNote is you can post directly to your blog from OneNote.

By doing so, you can use OneNote’s great note taking features to record your thoughts and ideas and use the flexible interface to combine them all into one spot. Then, a button click and everything can be posted to your blog. Pretty cool eh? I got pretty excited in the thoughts of using OneNote’s video and audio recorder inserting a video into a blog post, but all that passed through was a gif and video title. (see below)

Additionally, you have the formatting and spell-check of Office at your disposal, so you can easily change your fonts and text from within OneNote and pass it onto your blog. For me, this is nice as my WordPress interface doesn’t have great text formatting options.

Video recording started: 12:32 PM Sunday, February 25, 2007

There are probably better ways to set it up, but I’m the kinda guy who shoots first and asks questions later. I began writing a post before I set up the connection SO I could post. In other words, I started writing a post - Then tried to post it to the blog so it would bring up the blog setup options.

So to get this screen to pop up, I right click the top bar and choose “blog this” from the menu.

After that, a setup dialog appears where you simply enter the URL of your blog and posting username and password.

Then, for some reason it launches into MS Word. Not sure why they chose this route, but I guess if you wanted to do additional formatting, this would be the place to do it. You can use a number of different formatting options:

I had some trouble setting up the connections to accept pictures and files. But found it probably had something to do with the ftp settings on the blog. So I went ahead and redirected the pictures to my smartgoalsoftware server until I figure out what the problem is.

The one problem I do have is the large linebreaks between paragraphs. What is that? Anyone know how to fix it?

But other than that, I find the interface of OneNote and Word 2007 to be far more pleasing to use than the standard WordPress. It makes things more fun and easy to post.