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Office 2007 and Blogging

I finally started running my copy of Office 2007, and I wish I had abandoned Open Office earlier.

Everything is a lot more snappy and responsive than I expected. The common wisdom of each new version of Office requiring hardware upgrades seems unwarranted in face of this. Certainly, it is furiously faster than Open Office. I don't expect to make as much use of Google Docs and Spreadsheets, either. Word is taking up 20 megabytes in memory, while Firefox is eating 300 MB. Which one I prefer to keep running is obvious.

Now, I tried to write blogs with Open Office, but I found no plug-ins to get it to post to Blogger. You would really think I could use Google Docs, but somehow they don't properly support posting to their own blogging service from their own word processor service! Multiple blogs on one account is not supported. Posting draws the title from the first line in the document, even if the title is present and differs from this, meaning the title appears repeated in the final post. Meanwhile, Word 2007 actually includes support to operate with Blogger, a competitor's service, and supports multiple blogs. This is out of the box, as well.

Lately, I took some heat for my hard views on the whole IronPython versus Python issue, so I want to clear up some things about my opinion and my open mindedness. I will be looking at IronPython for writing plug-ins for Office, and here it doesn't bother me that things will be missing, because I am not using the other things. My first hopeful project: a free, and actually available version of Scout, the ribbon search that politics killed.

One thing that has disappointed me is the static nature of the Ribbon, which is not how I understood it to be. This could be the product of my usage patterns thus far, but I have several times expected it to adapt to me, if it really did that. For example, when I select some text during the writing of a blog post, the hyperlink options should appear. It just seems that is not how the Ribbon works, but am I alone in thinking that was the whole idea?

Comments

Michael Foord said…
I look forward to reading about your explorations. :-)
9:02 AM
da newb said…
Nice. Do you know if they are planning on releasing Office 2007 for Macs anytime soon?
11:20 AM
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