Insert Table with Windows Live Writer for Your Blog

I used to write my blog post in MS word, then OpenOffice writer and later on write directly in the Blogger platform itself.  However, there is one common problem with all these methods is that to insert a table into my blog post is always troublesome. Whatever the table that I created in either word or OpenOffice, I can’t port it over to my blogspot. The copy & paste just doesn’t work or it doesn’t show up exactly the one I expected. Converting to HTML doesn’t work either. Not to talk about the blogger platform which there is no way for you to insert a table at all!

Well of course the workaround I used to do is write the HTML code directly for table. Nowadays, do we really still need to code in HTML code? So I found the best reliable to use the Windows Live Writer which generates the exactly basic table HTML code. This is exactly what I”m looking for that which is kind of simple in fact.

Windows Live Writer is completely free from Microsoft and I find it the very useful and simple enough to use.  I start using it to write my draft, then later on port it over to my blogging platform. The thing I don’t really comfortable with is the “Publish” feature which allows you to publish directly to your blogging platform. It requires you to enter your “password” of your blogging platform which I don’t really trust Microsoft on this. Therefore, I don’t really use it to publish my post and  instead I manually port it over to my blogging platform. Do I use it the wrong way?

You can download Windows Live Writer here.


Few Notes: 

• Windows Live writer won’t allow you start writing your draft until you link your blog account. Since I don’t like the “Publish” feature, what I did is to simply register the Windows Live ID. Go to “Blogs” –> “Add Blog Account…” and select “I don’t have a blog; create one Windows Live for me”. Click next and follow the on-screen instructions.

• After I write my draft or insert my table (in “Edit” tab at below), I click the the “Source” tab to view the raw HTML format. I will then just copy & paste this HTML code into my blogging platform. This is as simple as that.

• You need to click on the “Save draft” after you write your content. To retrieve your draft, you just need to click on the upper right of the windows.

P/S: I still do it manually for inserting the picture and image into the blogger platform which I’m perfectly fine with it. However if you use the “Publish” feature, this should be fine and you do not need to manually upload your picture. I also use Windows Live Writer to write my blog post content offline. This is very useful especially when I”m traveling to China where a lot of websites are blocked (e.g. blogger.com is one of them).