Microsoft Word pencils in blog support

The forthcoming Office Beta 2 release will offer a special Blog Post tab

The forthcoming version of Microsoft Word will allow users to publish blog postings directly from the application, Microsoft has announced.

The functionality will be included in the forthcoming Beta 2 of the application that is scheduled for release later this month. The finished product is due to ship to consumers in January 2007.

Bloggers who currently use Microsoft Word to draft their postings have experienced trouble when they paste the text into online blog publishing tools such as Blogger or Typepad.

Because Word uses non-standard HTML tags, the text in the final blog posting can become mangled.

But many bloggers will still prefer to use Word over the hosted blog editors, Joe Friend, lead programme manager on the World design team, claimed on a company blog.

"When I write a blog post using my blog provider's web-based editor I miss some of the familiar Word features that I've come to rely on, specifically background spelling (those little red squiggles) and autocorrect," he wrote.

"These features keep me from making stupid mistakes. Also, I simply want to use the tool that I use for most of my other writing tasks."

The forthcoming Office Beta 2 release will offer a special Blog Post tab, featuring buttons that let bloggers publish their creations and set style elements such as bold or strikethrough fonts.

The new feature will also offer automatically to upload pictures and convert Office graphics such as charts and diagrams into browser compatible .png images.

The Beta software will offer built-in support for the MSN Spaces and Google-owned Blogger services.

Users will be able to manually add blogging services that support metaweblog API or the ATOM API, which are used by most mainstream blogging platforms.