Here’s my test post. Some things I don’t like about this is that if I were to add a picture to this post, there is no option other than to not upload the picture or to upload it using ftp. I am hoping for Flickr support. I also don’t have any category options, which kind of sucks as well.

What’s nice is that I have all the options available to me from MS Word so I can do all sorts of cool formatting, etc if I chose to. What I was wondering about is that if I did choose to do some formatting directly in Word, would it over write what CSS otherwise manages for me on my WordPress site. Here’s a trial to see what happens:

I am BOLD.

I am Italic.

I am Underlined.

I am RED and BOLD.

It worked, obviously. I chose the publish as draft option, went to WordPress and reviewed the post. The issue other than the ones I mentioned above is that it timestamped it as December 31, 1969 @ 17:59. I wasn’t born yet, by the way. I had to change that manually, as I did the categories.

I recently read this blog article where one of the members of the Excel 2007 team talks through the process that Microsoft used to redesign the charting functionality of Excel in the upcoming release.

There are a bunch of interesting things about this article, but the most interesting thing to me is that Microsoft actually employs people that they call User Experience Designers. I have heard from lots of Microsoft employees and all over the web when I read about the new version of office that this release is squarely focused on improved useability. Seeing these articles show that they are absolutely committed to it and as a beta user, I can’t help but give them credit. It looks great to me.

By the way, I used Writely to post this to my blog, just as a test, and its a fantastic blog authoring tool. Microsoft Word offers this as well, and actually does support WordPress, so I’ll try that next time.