How to Share Blog Post from Microsoft Word to WordPress?

WordPress is the popular content management system for blogging. However, it is not a good idea to sit in front of your WordPress editor and prepare content online. Many bloggers prefer to prepare content using text editors like Microsoft Word. It will be an easy task to copy and paste the content from Word to WordPress editor and upload images. If you follow this workflow, do you ever wonder directly publishing blog posts from Microsoft Word to WordPress without opening the admin panel? Yes, it is super easy and we will explain how to do that in this article.

What You Need?

You need the followings, in order to share blog post from Word to WordPress.

• WordPress admin username and password. You can use both WordPress.com and WordPress.org blog for sharing posts from Word.
• XMLRPC link, it should be like https://www.yoursite.com/xmlrpc.php. If you have installed WordPress on subdirectory then change the URL accordingly. Remember, many security plugins block XMLRPC from public access. Make sure you are not blocking the access.
• Microsoft Word on Windows laptop or PC. We do not see the blog post sharing option is available in Word for Mac.

Document Sharing in Microsoft Word

You can either prepare a new document or share the one already you have on the computer to your WordPress blog. Open the document and go to “File > Share” menu.

Select “Post to Blog” option to see the list of available options. Word offers direct blog post sharing for SharePoint Blog, WordPress, Telligent Community and TypePad platforms. At this point, you do not need to select the platform and click on “Post to Blog” button to proceed further.

Word will prompt you to register your blog account. Click “Register Later” button to connect with your WordPress account after preparing the content.

Preparing Content in Word

Word will open your document with different publisher view. You can ass blog post title and edit or create your content similar to creating normal Word documents.

At this point, you can’t assign category to your post since you did not connect your WordPress account.

Publishing Blog Post

After your content is ready, click on the “Publish” button. You can either publish the content as a live post or add in your blog in draft status.

Connecting to WordPress Account

Now, Word will ask you to register the blog account to post the content and click on the “Register an Account” button.

Click on the blog provider dropdown and choose “WordPress” option and click “Next” button.

On the next “New WordPress Account” dialog box, you have to provide the XMLRPC and admin details.

It may be confusing to see the “Blog Post URL” will be showing as “http://<Enter your blog URL here>/xmlrpc.php”. You should not enter the blog post URL here, Word will automatically consider the title as the post URL slug in WordPress. In this text box, you need to simply enter the XMLRPC link like “https://www.yoursite.com/xmlrpc.php”. under “Enter account information section, provide you WordPress admin username and password that you use to login to your dashboard.

If you want to change the image uploading option, click on the “Picture Options” button. Here you can choose the provider for your images. In normal case, you should leave this as it is as “My blog provider”.

Click on “OK” buttons to connect Word to your WordPress account. After successful connection, you should see a message like below:

In case of errors, you will see a message like below. Click on “More Information” button to get additional details of the error. Most probably, you should check and provide correct username and password.

When the account is connected, you will see a post published message on top of the document. You can login to your WordPress admin panel and check the post is added with published or draft status as you have selected in Word.

Editing Existing Blog Posts

In addition to posting new blog posts, it is also possible to edit any of your existing post on the connected WordPress site. click on the “Open Existing” menu under “Blog Post” tab. This will show you the list of all available blog posts on your site. select the post you want to edit and click on “OK” button.

You can edit the content and assigned category. It is also possible to add additional categories by clicking on “Insert Category” button and choose from the dropdown list. After finishing editing, click on “Publish” button to update it on your live blog.

Managing Blog Accounts

Word allows you to connect multiple accounts from WordPress and other available blogging platforms. You can click on “Manage Accounts” to see all available accounts. If you do not want to use the sharing, simply select the account and click on “Remove” button to delete the connection.

If you like the sharing of blog posts from Word to WordPress directly, then check the box that shows “Remember Password”. This will help to avoid providing username and password every time when publishing content.

Some Glitches in Sharing

This process is very simple and useful for those wanted to share content frequently from Word to WordPress. However, it has some minor glitches.

• Word does not offer tags which is widely used in WordPress blogs.
• Though Word uploads all inserted images, all of them will have the same name as title suffixed with incremental number. Unfortunately, Word ignores caption and alt text if added to the images in documents when posting in WordPress. This does not make sense when you have meaningful images and need to change all images Alt text one by one.
• You can share a blog post only with .docx file extension. In case, if you have old .doc documents, first convert them into .docx before sharing.
• Blog post sharing is available all Word version for Windows. However, this option is not available in Word for Mac version.

Final Words

In our opinion, sharing blog posts from Word to WordPress is a useful function especially when you have plenty of text to publish. You can quickly, write down your thoughts in Word with proper formatting and alignment to share to your blog in few clicks. We recommend you to share as a draft so that you can preview from WordPress admin panel and adjust before publishing live. Make sure to add proper caption and alt text to your images and assign tags and multiple categories if needed.