I Posted This Blog Directly from Microsoft Word: Here’s How

By John Bath

The title says it all; using an often overlooked feature in the 2013 and 2016 versions of Office, I uploaded this very post to our site directly from Word. For me, this was very exciting to learn! As Metro CSG’s resident blogster, being able to cut out the process of drafting a post in Word and then pasting it into our site’s blogging platform is a very big deal (Especially when reporting news as it breaks). No more having to reformat and manually upload all the photos I wish to include! Overall, I can use this feature of word to make me more productive, and in this post, I want to show you how you can set it up for yourself.

To get started you’re going to want to open Word and create a new document, a list of templates will come up like so:

In the template section, go ahead and select “Blog Post.” This will bring up the template you will want to use to draft your post in Word

After clicking the Create button shown above, you will be prompted to register your Office Account with your blog. You can do this at any time, and opting not to will not prevent you from drafting your post.

When you do choose to register, however, you will be presented with a list of compatible blog platforms to choose from in a dropdown menu shown below.

After selecting your blog provider of choice, you only have one more step to complete your registration: filling in your credentials. This step can be a little tricky because it requires you know a bit about your site’s directory. As you can see below, you will need to include the URL for your blog inside the brackets. In most cases, it will be something similar to http://www.yoursite.com/blog.

You will also be asked to include the username and password you use to log in to your site.

If this doesn’t work, you may need to look into the cPanel or equivalent directory of your site and locate the folder the xmlrpc.php file is in. This line of directory is what you must include in the url line. You may also need to find out if your site has a different directory name than the actual domain of your site and include that (http://yoursite.hostcompany.com/blog for example).

Once your registration is successful, you will be taken to a Word document customized for drafting blog posts. In the blog post ribbon, for example, you will see a number of different options related to posting. Selecting any of them will require you to sign in with the credentials of your site again.

• Publish: Publishes your post to the web. Once you’ve finished writing, go ahead and click!
  
• Homepage: Clicking this link will take you to the homepage of your website registered with Office
  
• Insert Category: Inserts a dropdown list below you blog title which will allow you to categorize the blog post (As news or a guide, for example)
  
• Open Existing: Brings up a list of all previous blog posts, which can be edited within word.
  
• Manage Accounts: Lets you add or remove existing blog accounts (in case you have more than one)
  

Aside from that, you will see a ribbon very similar to that of any other Word document, complete with font, font size, formatting, spell check, etc.

Other available ribbons include inserting media into the document and formatting for photos and tables, much like any other word document.

And there you have it! After a few steps you’ll be ready to save time by posting blogs right from your desktop. Once you’ve completed your post, simply click the publish button and you’re good to go. Depending on your blog provider of choice, there may be a few stray tweaks to make within your blog platform that are not universal. Tags, featured images and other SEO related criteria may need to be added in, for example, but as far as getting the meat of your post up there, you’d be set!

As of the date of this writing, this feature of Office is only available in the desktop client and not the online portal for Office 365. The two have become increasingly similar over the last few months, however, as various redesigns and added features have blurred the line between web app and client, so this becoming a web feature is not outside the realm of possibility.

Have any other useful Office tips you’d like to share? We’d love to hear them! Feel free to comment about what you’ve read here, and please do share our post elsewhere if you liked it!