Blogging from Word?
Since Office 2007 Beta 2 came out, one thing that pops up now and again in the blogosphere is that you can now write blog posts directly from Word 2007.
I haven't bothered to try it yet, mostly because I'm not much of a Word (or Office) user - and I'm happy writing blog posts using the web-based authoring tools that come with Community Server. But I've been thinking about it, and there's something that I think is a little off kilter.
What is Word for? It's for writing documents. Generally you write .doc files. They get saved somewhere, either to your local file system, your network, or some repository like Sharepoint. But they're discrete files.
What is Outlook for? Reading, writing, and sending messages to some location over the wire. Emails are most common, but you can get it to read and write newsgroup entries, you can read public folders, you can read rss feeds. All for 'documents' that generally don't become files, but rather stored, displayed, and used in some other way.
So why is it that we can use Word to write blog posts? Shouldn't this be an Outlook feature, rather than a Word feature? Wouldn't it make more sense to see 'Blog Post' appear as an entry in this menu:
(Apologies. This is a screenshot of Outlook 2003. I can't run Outlook 2007 at work. Yet :)
It doesn't make sense to me. Anyone have any comments?