Customizable styles in Google Docs

Google Docs now have Customizable styles in documents.

This is a feature that MS Word has had for a long time, which makes a huge productivity difference to anyone who is writing long documents.

Basically, instead of formattting each sub-heading individually (eg making it bold, 12 pt and underlined), you just say once what the rules for that "heading2" is (eg bold, 12 pt and underlined), and then apply "heading2" to any text that you want to look like this. The time-saving comes when make a change.  For example, when you realise that underlining is for typewriters, instead of having to change each sub-heading individually, you just change heading2 to be (say) bold and 14 point - and all the same change is made to every place where you've used "heading2".

I don't know the the addition of Styles to Docs means they will be added to Blogger's Post-editor anytime soon.   But it may affect loading Word documents to Blogger via Google Docs. I haven't tested yet, so don't know if Word's styles will be kept when the document is converted - but I'd hope that they would, given that it's a very mature feature in Word.

The interesting part will come when you either copy-and-paste or publish from Docs to Blogger: is the formatting itself transferred over, or just the style name?

My guess, without testing, is that for copy-and-paste, it might just be the style name. If that's right, then to make the Word-to-Docs-to-Blogger conversion work, you will need to add CSS rules to your blog, using the same style names used in Docs.

And if you have a lot of email subscribers, remember mind that the messages they receive do not have your blog's stylesheet applied to them.   (I experimented with various header style options in BloggerHAT, but eventually gave us and followed the example of other big-time bloggers and applied the formatting manually, for just this reason:  no matter what I tried, my email-subscription messages looked bad,)

(BTW: If you know a way to apply a stylesheet to emails sent by Feedburner, or even by Blogger, then I'd love to hear about it.)

Read more > Customizable styles in Google Docs

Uploading MS Word documents to Blogger - via Google Docs

This article is about transferring material from Microsoft Word .doc documents to your Blog posts, using Google Docs to keep the formatting.

Previously in writing posts for Blogger in MS Word, I noted that if the source document is MS Word, then the only approach is to copy/paste via a text-editor.

Unless, of course you use a totally different tool like Windows Live Writer instead of Word.

But recently I had a Flash of the Blindingly Obvious (TM):   Google Docs lets you upload MS Word documents, and offers to convert them to Docs format during the upload.   Google Docs is web-friendly, and is pretty compatible with Blogger.   So it should be possible to upload a Word .doc to Docs, convert and open it in Docs and copy/paste into Blogger.

Does it work?

So far, I've tested this approach with two different documents:  a very simple document (one header and two paragraphs) and a slightly longer document with a lot of formatting (I took my own CV, took all the personal details out but kept the formatting).

You can see the results in these posts:

• Converting a simple Word file to Blogger, and
• Converting a complex Word document to Blogger using Google Docs.

The results are promising.   In each case, the pasted contents were accepted by Blogger and the post published without any further editing.    

There are some issues:

• In the complex document, the tablular layouts are followed strictly, resulting in some parts of the post that are wider than the standard column.
• I haven't tested it with a long document (more than 4 pages):  in theory there shouldn't be any problems, but I have had issues with conversion of some larger document previously.
• And I'm sure that it won't work with some of Word's advanced features that aren't (yet) supported by Docs,eg auto-generated tables.
• I'm not sure how well conversion from Word on a Mac to Google Docs works.  

I'm keen to hear about other people's experience with this approach - please leave a comment below comment below.

Detailed Instructions:

Follow these steps to transfer material from Word to Blogger via Google Docs:

1. Log in to Docs   (www.docs.googe.com)
2. Click Upload ...
3. Click Select files to upload ...
4. Select the source files from your computer
5. Made sure that "Convert documents, presentations, and spreadsheets to the corresponding Google Docs formats" is ticked 
6. Click Start Upload ...
7. When the upload is finished, choose Go Back to Google Docs
8. Open the file in Docs
9. Select the contents that you want to upload (possibly use Select All from the Docs menu)
10. Copy (you may need to use Edit / Copy from the browser, not from inside Docs)
11. Switch to the Blogger post editor, in Compose mode
12. Paste.
13. Add any other content that you want in your post.
14. Preview the post, and do any final formatting changes that are needed.

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Related Articles:

Writing posts for Blogger in MS Word.

Showing a PowerPoint Presentation as a slideshow in your blog

File sharing hosts:  places to store files used in your blog

Read more > Uploading MS Word documents to Blogger - via Google Docs

Writing posts for Blogger in MS Word (etc)

This article is about how you can write the content of your blog posts when you are not connected to the internet, and actually post them later when you are connected again.

Why write off-line?

Some people like to prepare their posts while they are off-line:  This may be because their internet connection costs are very high, eg on a cruise ship as a passenger or as crew, or because their internet connection in unreliable. Some people just find that they can be more creative when they're not connected and being interrupted by chat and emails. Others may have documents that they wrote before they knew that Blogger (or even the internet) existed, that they now want to put onto a blog.

If you copy-and-paste from MS Word (and other Microsoft programs too, eg Excel, PowerPoint), then a lot of extra codes are added to your text.  These characters can have all sorts of effects, eg I've seen a help-forum post about a page element in the sidebar changing colour unexpectedly which was finally tracked down to a copy-and-paste from Word.

So, to be safe, the advice is DON'T copy and paste from Microsoft directly to your blog.

Which leaves people asking, how can I:

• Write the contents of  blog posts when I'm not connected to the internet?
• Convert existing word-processor documents into to Blogger posts?
• Load content from another tool into your blog?

Some options:

Use a text editor:
The simplest approach is to write your document contents in a text-editor (eg Notepad) without any formatting.   You can copy-and-paste from there into Blogger when you are ready, and then you apply formatting after the text is put in the blogger editor.


Double copy-and-paste:
Another approach is to write in MS Word (etc).  When you're ready to post, copy the text into a text-editor (eg Notepad) first, and then copy it again from there before you past it into the blogger editor.   You will lose any formatting (bold, italics, indents etc) that you did in Word:  they will need to be re-done once your post is in the Blogger editor.

Write externally and link to the file:
You may decide not to load the document contents into Blogger at all.  Instead, load it to a file host (see File-hosting options), and link to it from your blog post with some anchor text.  

Anchor-text is the set of words that are used to link to something - for example, in the last sentence, "file-host options" is the anchor text, and "http://blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com/2010/01/file-sharing-hosts.html" is the link

If you do this you want to be sure that the people who will looking at the file will have software that can read it.   One good option can by to save it as a PDF file - if you use some file hosts, you can even get the HTML to display the PDF embedded in your blog (using option two from Putting external HTML into your blog).


Use a Blog-friendly editor:
One tool that you can use for off-line work is Windows Live Writer.  I haven't tried it myself (yet), but this article about it is from a person who generally gives very good advice.   That said, if you're going to use WLW, you need to keep using it, because there are some issues with switching back to the regular Blogger editor later on.

Another possible tool is MS Word version 10.   This has an option to publish blog posts.   It may not work in all situation - eg in some companies, the network may be set up so that you cannot make the necessary connection between Word and Blogger.  Also, I'm fairly sure that it will use the Live-Writer approach, so it's likely that posts originally written in Word 10 (and higher) may not be easily edited in Blogger.

A similar approach is to use a Blogger-friendly converter, ie a piece of software that takes a Word (etc) document and turns it into the type of HTML that Blogger can handle.   Google Docs is one option - there's a separate article for this approach, because it's so new and has so many potential options and challenges.  But so far, the feedback is that this works well.

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Related Articles: 



File-hosting options.

Using Windows Live Writer (external link).

Converting Word documents to Blogger via Google Docs

Showing a PowerPoint presentation in your blog

Putting external HTML into your blog

Read more > Writing posts for Blogger in MS Word (etc)