Testing Office 2007

Meant to start this series on moving to a new computer (gulp) and upgrading to Office 2007 (gulp, gulp) and Vista Pro (GULP!) in an orderly way with a post on how computers get old and slow. But when I told the new Microsoft Word that comes with Office 2007 that I wanted to create a new document, it asked me if I really meant a document or a blog post. Well, this is meant to be a blog post so…

Word asked me, reasonably, who my blog provider is – it's TypePad – and then for my TypePad ID and password; it warned me that these would be transmitted in the clear. Since I have several test blogs on TypePad as well as Fractals of Change, Word asked which one I wanted. Maybe I should have started with one of the test blogs but what the hell… let's give it a try.

If you read this post, it is possible to go directly from Word to a post without cutting and pasting. I'll let you know what steps intervene after I click the Publish icon.

Reset#1: After I clicked Publish, I noticed two typos and that there is an Insert Category button. Clicked cancel. Word became unresponsive for a while according to Vista but did recover and say that the blog service provider wasn't responding.

Clicked Insert Category; got back my category list from Typepad (nice) but can only choose one category even though TypePad makes it possible to choose several (not nice) but will continue the experiment.

Reset#2: OK. It did publish; in fact, so did my previous attempt. There is an Open Existing option so have done that and now am presumably editing and able to repost. Tried to use this option to delete the earlier post but can't do that (no big deal). Will try reposting by clicking Publish again. Then will go directly into TypePad to add more categories and Technorati Tags (too bad but not critical).

Just saw an option for handling pictures (imbedded, I hope) by uploading them to the blog provider (default) or somewhere else (which the documentation says can be anything with a public URL including Flickr). Will insert a picture below and leave the default to have it hosted at TypePad. Hmm.. scaling only gave a choice of 1% (maybe for a thumbnail?) but could simply specify a new height and the width adjusted to keep the aspect ratio. We'll see what happens.