Monday, August 5, 2013

Trying out Windows Live Writer 2012, really quickly

I just wanted to kick the tires on Windows Live Writer 2012 since I just had a question from one of the many frustrated bloggers trying to use MS Word with Blogger on my ancient post about doing just that.

Spell Check works, so that’s a nice plus. I do wonder if it uses the same dictionary as Word does.

Let’s try a copy/paste of a print screen of a window…

image

Wow, that worked too. Nice. I actually did not expect that to work.

Formatting and positioning for the image is very similar to Word as well.

Automatic “smart quotes” work, as well as do—double dash to em dash.

Wow, Live Writer. You are really impressing me. Why isn’t this functionality just part of Word 2013?

Okay, saving and exiting without publishing, then coming back…

That worked perfectly as well. I may be a Live Writer convert. Let’s try a quick publish and see if that (most important) part works as well.

And it did. Wow. Color me impressed MS Live Writer 2012. You may be my favorite new bit of software. And I just noticed the Edit, Preview, and Source tabs on the bottom of the screen. Complete with inline CSS options. Live Writer, you had me at ‘Hello’ (although I do find your penchant for exploding out shorthand CSS for padding into four separate rules a bit odd, when you don’t for margins… but I can live with that).