Do you post blogs using Microsoft Word?
By Arnab on Jun 7, 2008 in Internet
I never tried out the Microsoft World’s blog posting features. I always post from the WordPress WYSIWYG. I know a lot of people type up their posts in Microsoft Word because they like the spell check features and many others. I am personally not a big fan of Microsoft Word for creating online contents. The reason is because a lot of the characters that the word includes do not appear with a lot of older browsers. I do not want to take the risk of assuming that all my visitors are using latest IE. Most of the developers (including me) are actually still using the IE 6.0 simply because this version has a bigger market than 7.0. People just don’t seem to want to upgrade to 7.0 yet even though it’s out for a long time. Anyways, I try to make sure that all my visitors get the best user experience as much as possible. Therefore, I do not use it.
Today, however I decided to give this a try. Currently, I am typing this post my in Microsoft Word 2007. After I am done I will click on publish to publish it to my blog. This is just a test run to see how it goes. I know that many established people in blogs strongly recommend to type up our posts in Word before posting. I would rather suggest using something like Frontpage to type your posts up. Frontpage also uses the same spell check but it won’t insert the stupid characters that mess up display in older browsers and emails.
Better, why not give Google Docs a try? They have a decent spell check and you can just copy and paste your posts after you are done editing. This one automatically saves your information and therefore, while you are outside with an internet connection you can easily type it up.
There are lots of options you have. I would definitely suggest using a spell check no matter what. If you are using Firefox browser then it automatically includes one. It might actually be better to type up in MSWord if you don’t have any other options. However, look for characters that cause issues. Anything that is “curvy” like the quotation mark I used around the word “curvy” could cause issues in older browsers. There are other characters such as “ellipses” or” apostrophe.” Watch out for them and you will be fine.
Hey!
Other than MS Word consistecy of Firefox can also enable to use and make posts in decent way without making typographical mistakes
Plus! your font style are style according to MS WORD which shows that you are using WORD.
Regards
Jez
Jez | Jun 7, 2008 | Reply
Hey Jez, thanks for your first comment in my blog. Apparently after posting this post through MS Word 2007 I figured out that it didn’t touch the font at all. Everything was really good.
admin | Jun 7, 2008 | Reply
Yeah almost all of my posts are first written with MS Word because of the grammar and the spell check. THe WordPress editor doesn’t have a spell check which is consistent as MS Word’s.
AJ | Jun 8, 2008 | Reply
I’ve never used MS Word for posting, but am going to start. Last week I was listening to an audio from Daphne Gray Grant,”the publication coach”.
She uses MS Word because you can set it up so that you can tell what reading level you are writing at (she suggests 8-9th grade) and you can tell how many passive sentences you have (she suggests under 5%). It was easy to set up MS Word to perform this task.
I wrote a couple new articles using this approach. I have to admit my articles were a lot easier to read and gave a much better visual of what I was trying to explain. She has quite a few good tibits on her website.
Medic
Gout Treatments | Jun 9, 2008 | Reply
wow. very smart approach. I usually write in very basic english. It’s always good. Our goal is to get your views across. We don’t need to be sophisticated here.
admin | Jun 9, 2008 | Reply
I just write in wordpress itself and at the last moment before publishing use MSword-2007 for the grammar check.
By the way gout wrote about testing of readability level. where is this feature in the MSword. I couldn’t find any.
gedet basumatary | Jun 10, 2008 | Reply
gedet,
When you are in Word, click on Tools>Options>Spelling&Grammar. Click the box “readability statistics” which is down towards the bottom of the box.
Just to the right of the “readability statistics” that you clicked, you will also see a section called “Writing style:”. It will say “Grammar only”. Change the setting to “Grammar & Style”. There is a “Settings” button underneat this section, click on it.
You will see a long list of items that are clicked. Unclick the box for “Sentences beginning with And, But, and Hopefully”.
After you do this, click OK. Then click the next OK and you are done.
When you edit your article, you just click on Tools>Spelling and Grammar and it’ll show you any changes you need to make such as spelling or sentence fragments. You can either ignore or fix the corrections, and then it will take you to the reading level box I am referring to,
The box gives you your Word Counts, Averages, and Readability.
Fortunately, you only have to set this up once. After that, it is very easy to find the information, basically two clicks.
Hope this helps and I hope I explained it clearly enough. I find this feature in Word very helpful.
Gout Treatments | Jun 16, 2008 | Reply
All I do from Word is; write post in MS Word and then go to Add Post and paste it there. That’s all I use MS word for in WordPress.
Zaheer Ahmed Khan | Aug 15, 2009 | Reply