There seriously has been nothing going on.

It’s so boring around here that I didn’t have the heart to blog about nothing yesterday. Or, it could be that I just couldn’t think of anything good. Whichever you prefer.

I have been doing geeky things, but nothing anyone would really be interested it. But I’m going to tell you about it anyway.

I downloaded the Microsoft Office Beta a bit ago, and damn, it’s confusing. Kinda. Since I mostly use Word out of the bunch, that’s what I’m going to focus on.

The navigation bar for the new office programs is slick, but hard to understand. Even though I’ve been using Office since the dark ages, this new nav bar is messing up my mind. Things aren’t where they used to be, and it takes a little thinking to find them again. It doesn’t help that I haven’t really had a reason to create a document since the semester ended, and I downloaded the beta after that.

Not that Microsoft made it obvious, but you can actually blog from the new Word, and my last few posts have been published that way. However, I really am not a big fan of how everything is set up. To start with, there is no way to create a blog post without opening up a regular document first. I suppose Microsoft is assuming that people will create a document, and then decide “hey, I think I’m gonna blog that.” Then, when you do choose to blog, it creates a completely new document with the same exact text. Pointless, I tell you. It should be seamless.

I think that if you open a blank document, one of those lovely little tabs should say “blog post,” and when you click on it, it should give you the options you need: publish, publish as draft, remove formatting, etc., etc. When you decide to blog, it shouldn’t make an entirely new document out of it.

Also, I’m a bit afraid to start in with the formatting on the posts. If I bold something, I have no guarantee that it’s going to convert to <strong> over something else. It would be nice if the writer was offered some way to see the HTML before the post, and insert some of your own. I’m unsure how to do lesser headings since any code you type out in the document doesn’t get converted when it’s uploaded . Also, I wish that formatting would be stripped from the <p> tags that Word sends from a regular document to a blog document.

On the publishing side of things, Word doesn’t have a problem connecting to WordPress at all. However, it doesn’t respond as one would hope. When publishing, it sets the timestamp to WordPress’s default, December 31, 1969. It’s rather annoying, because once you post you have to go and edit the timestamp. Also, categories are not supported, so if you’re using them, again, editing in the admin panel has to happen.

I think that if Microsoft wants to make Word a viable option in blogging, these changes need to happen. I really hate posting, and then going in and editing my post, and I don’t want Word throwing bad code after good. If you like what you’re using now to post, don’t even bother with Word’s beta.

I’d go back to Ecto if I wasn’t so frustrated with it too, at the moment.

—”Electricity,” 311: 311

Tagged: review, software on Thursday, June 8, 2006 · 2 Comments »