In this guide I’ll cover how to publish blog posts with Microsoft Word 2013 and SharePoint 2013. Now Microsoft Word has had blogging capabilities since 2007 and they’ve not changed too much in all those years but it is a powerful feature nonetheless and certainly worth covering.

So let’s get started!

1. Open Microsoft Word 2013.

2. Click the File tab at the top-left followed by New.

3. Choose the Blog Post from the available templates, if for whatever reason you can’t see it then a quick search should find it.

4. The first time you open the Blog Post template it will open a small popup asking you to Register a Blog Account. Click Register Now and you will go through the setup process.

5. Choose SharePoint blog from the drop-down menu at this point then click Next.

6. Now you will want to enter the address of your SharePoint blog, as an example I will setup using my personal SharePoint blog so the address will be along the lines of https://SharePointAddress/personal/Username/Blog, once you’ve filled in the address click OK.

7. You should now get a popup saying ‘Account registration successful’, if not then be sure you have used the correct address.

8. Now that you’ve setup the link between Word and SharePoint, create your blog post.

I’ll take a moment to quickly explain some of the features that can be seen in the ribbon that deal with your new blogging abilities.

• Publish – publishes your blog article.
• Home Page – Takes you to the homepage of the blog on SharePoint.
• Insert category – Inserts a field into your blog post that lets you select which category the article will appear under in SharePoint.
• Open Existing – Allows you to edit existing blog posts using Word.
• Manage Accounts – Allows you to switch to other blog accounts if you use more than one.

9. Now that you’ve wrote your blog and understand the features I’ve briefly described above it’s time to hit the Publish button to publish your new blog post to SharePoint. Which will give you a nice new blog post as shown below.

And that’s your SharePoint blog setup!

In future all you will need to do to make a new post is to select the new blog template as shown in step 3, Word will save your SharePoint settings so there’s no setup required after the first time.