If you have Microsoft Word 2007 or newer, you can use Microsoft Word to write and publish posts as I’m doing with this post. This makes it easy to keep up with your blogging during those times that you don’t have Internet access like traveling in a car or airplane, or sitting at the doctor’s office waiting for them to call your name.

I’m using Microsoft Word 2013, so I’m going to walk through the steps of using this version, but from what I found online it’s pretty similar to previous versions. The first thing that you want to do is search for Blog in your templates. Once you find it you’ll need to click Download or Create, depending on if the template is already present on your computer or not.

Setting up your WordPress blog in Microsoft Word

The first time you create a blog post, Word will ask you to enter the following details about your WordPress blog:

Blogging Service – Choose WordPress.

Address of your blog – this is the URL to your blog, such as www.yourblog.com, or in my case it was www.silist.com.

Login credentials – enter the same login and password you use to login at yourblog.com/wp-admin

*Note – you will need to have XML-RPC enabled on your WordPress blog in order to publish to your WordPress blog from Microsoft Word.

If you don’t have all of your details handy, you can choose to setup your blog information later.

Writing Posts

Writing blog posts in Microsoft Word is pretty similar to creating a typical Word document, which is why I really like writing my posts with MS Word. I’ve written thousands of documents in Word and I’m very familiar with formatting my document. What’s cool is when creating how to articles, like this one, it’s easy to get the formatting correct and to insert pictures. So, just write your post as you would any other Word document and it will publish up to your blog just as you see it in Word.

When you enter pictures into your post it will automatically upload them into your Media Library. Right now I have not found a way to add a Featured Image, so you will need to add that to your post after publishing it as either a draft or live.

Publishing Posts

I prefer to publish my posts as Drafts rather than publishing them to the live site right away. This gives me the opportunity to check the formatting of the content and any images I have added. It also lets add a Featured Image as well. To publish, just go to Publish in the upper, left-hand corner of Word and click the down arrow. This will allow you to publish to either a Draft or to Live.

Have fun writing posts offline!