Making blog posts with Microsoft OneNote

I was fiddling around with OneNote 2007 today and stumbled across the function ‘Send to > Blog’

If you briefly saw a very strange and jumbled post it was the result of my playing with this feature. Now having messed around with this discovery, it seems that OneNote, via Word 2007, does indeed play nicely with XMLRPC and WordPress hosting.

Once you’ve finished writing a piece in OneNote, just select Send To > Blog.

OneNote will then open Word for you to polish up the document. If you’ve just used OneNote’s inking pen to do this (which I normally am using given I have a Tablet PC), then this process converts your handwriting to text (and it does a pretty good job at it too, assuming that your handwriting is at least legible).

Just as an aside, I think it is most strange that Word’s dictionary doesn’t recognise the word Blog, even though it’s written in the toolbar

Once in Word, you can then publish directly to your WordPress hosted blog site. It just asks you for the address, name, password etc.

You can publish the content as a draft, or as a complete publication.

Amazingly enough, you can even open existing posts in order to edit and update them!

You might need to tweak the image links in WordPress if you’ve put pictures into the document from Word. And I did find that some of the paragraph formatting was weird, but largely it worked a treat, even allowing you to identify the category for the post.

For someone like me who is often on the road, this is a great feature Microsoft have added to this product. I can now manage all my posts on my tablet rather than feeling their sort of at arms length inside WordPress.

Moblogging? Here I come!

M