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Google unites Blogger and Microsoft Word

Elinor Mills Former Staff Writer
Elinor Mills covers Internet security and privacy. She joined CNET News in 2005 after working as a foreign correspondent for Reuters in Portugal and writing for The Industry Standard, the IDG News Service and the Associated Press.
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Elinor Mills

Google released this week a Blogger for Word toolbar that lets people post musings directly to their Google Blogger sites from Microsoft Word.

Blogger for Word is a free downloadable plug-in that enables users to easily save a Word document as a post to their Blogger blog without having to open a browser, as well as save drafts of blogs and edit their work offline for later posting.

You need to have a free Blogger account and be using Windows 2000 or higher and Word 2000 or higher.

Apparently, Google got the idea from watching those pioneering, prolific bloggers try to post their writings online during the Democratic National Convention last year.

"Many were using Microsoft Word to post their reports. It was a multi-step process that didn't look like fun, but for citizen journalists, punctuation, spelling and grammar are important," Product Manager Jason Shellen wrote in a Google blog on Tuesday. "That got the Blogger team thinking about how to help Word users to become bloggers."

Too bad using Microsoft Word doesn't guarantee quality of writing. [Disclaimer: This blog was written in Microsoft Word.]