I’ve been using primarily Microsoft FrontPage 2003 to author blogs because, like many people, even the reduced HTML output of Word 2003 and older wasn’t clean and tidy and was often difficult to stylize in CSS. This also made it a pain to copy and paste code samples from Visual Studio into Word in order to get HTML to then paste in my blog.

But now, thanks to Joe Friend and his feature team, you can now post clean and tidy HTML directly to blogs in Word 2007 Beta 2. I was already impressed with Office 2007 Beta 1 and what I’ve seen so far in Beta 2, but this really is just the icing on the cake. No longer do I have to worry about several manual steps when posting new blog posts and I still get all the great features of Word like background spell-checking and rich text paste support for posting syntax-colored code examples directly from Visual Studio.