Fat Tires & Big Brakes

One of the things I dislike about WordPress is that it doesn't have a table editor like SubText does. Unfortunately, even the mighty SubText can compare to Word 2007 when it comes to table editing. Let's say I'm Ardell and I want to tell the bubble people they are wrong about some random nugget of real estate information. After all, I have the multiple's database at my fingertips, so I know the facts. Let's say I'm trying to point out that Kirkland is the most affordable lakefront community along the I-405 corridor (I'm showing off Word, not trying to prove this assertion. So don't flame me and tell me Renton is a better value.)

So, I create an empty table with a click and drag of my mouse like so….

And then I fill up my table with the facts I want to present. What's cool is that after you're done filling your table with data, you can then select Table Design tab from the ribbon and have word reformat your drab table into something more professional looking. Think of it as staging your blog content by painting the walls and rearranging the furniture. So with a few mouse movements you can convert this old thing…

Into this

An Excel-lent Power train

Even cooler is Word 2007's ability to use Excel 2007's charting engine (which like Word, has undergone very significant improvement from last version) from a blog post. So with a few more mouse clicks you can convert one of the above tables into a professional looking chart like so…

Now with your data presented in an attractive, easy to understand chart, you'll be the envy of all your readers. Everybody will think you're the consummate professional that spends hours writing your blog posts (even though you haven't spent more than 5 minutes creating your chart). Word 2007 also has a cool feature that Microsoft calls SmartArt. It's basically an easy way of creating professional looking diagrams, flowcharts, or org-charts. For example, the following illustration shows what makes a good blog post.

(to be continued…)