One of the Surface reviews I saw recently expressed concern that the Live Essentials suite wouldn’t be available under Windows RT. I generally don’t use much from that suite but the idea that the functionality wouldn’t be available got me interested. Was the lack of Live Essentials actually worth fretting over or would the gap be filled by other by other solutions?

It turns out that although there’s still a bit of a gap with no movie maker but most of the functionality is indeed provided by other dedicated applications like mail, calendar, photos, and SkyDrive. What really surprised me though is that Word is a great substitute for Live Writer. Until a few days ago I had no idea that Word could be used to compose and publish blog posts to most of the major blogging platforms.

Out of the box, Word supports publishing to:

• Blogger
• SharePoint blog
• Telligent Community
• TypePad
• WordPress

The documentation states that providers may be available in the Office marketplace.

Getting started is just a matter of creating a new document with the Blog post Template. The template was already installed for me in both Word 2010 and 2013 but if you don’t have it you should be able to find it in the online gallery.

The first time you use the Blog post template Word will tell you that you need to register your blog account and give you the option to register now or later. I opted to just get the registration over and get on with blogging. To register your account you just need to select your provider and enter your blog’s URL and your account credentials. Word will take care of the rest including creating or updating the post and uploading any media such as images to your media gallery.

After your blog is registered and you’re ready to publish you can push the content to the provided by clicking the Publish button in the BLOG POST ribbon.

Word offers two options for publishing to WordPress: Publish or Publish as Draft. I didn’t look at the other providers so I don’t know what additional options they provide. I generally like to configure other options like scheduling and tags before publishing so I’ve been opting to publish as draft then open the my WordPress dashboard to complete the process.

Word also make it convenient to insert categories, open existing posts including drafts, and manage your blog accounts. Of course, if you don’t like the experience of blogging with Word, the browser is still a viable option.