This morning, I thought I would try to take advantage of the ability to publish blog posts to WordPress directly from Microsoft Word 2010. There are numerous posts out there (such as this one) that explain the basics of connecting Word 2010 to WordPress, and to be fair the process is quite simple.

Unfortunately, when I initially tried to connect to my hosted WordPress instance, I received a “helpful” error message:

Clicking “More Information” brought up a “Help with blogging in Word” page that didn’t directly address my problem, but jogged my memory just enough to clue me in. I hadn’t enabled XML-RPC from my WordPress Writing Settings (under Remote Publishing)!

After enabling XML-RPC, I was good to go (as evidenced by your ability to see this post)!

My initial thoughts about this capability:

• I like being able to use Word as a platform for composing and editing posts.
• I really like using Word to paste and crop screenshots, then letting Word manage the upload and linking of the images automatically within my posts.
• I was able to easily open posts I had previously published via the browser-based WordPress interface, and save for some minor formatting issues (e.g., missing line breaks), everything came over perfectly into Word.
• I could not readily find a place to tag my posts in the Word interface. This is a small drawback.
• I got ambitious and tried to superimpose a shape over an image. Word treated these as two separate images and inserted a line break between them. It was worth a shot.
• I wish credentials didn’t have to be sent in the clear to take advantage of this capability, and I expect this could be a show-stopper for many users. I suppose I will have to change my password often (be sure to update the account within Word after you do that).

If you have Office 2010 and enjoy using Word as an authoring platform, I highly recommend giving this capability a try!