Larry Kuhn

I'm really growing fond of the blog authoring experience that Word 2007 provides. As a long time Word user, it feels like a comfortable old pair of shoes. The only thing that's been getting on my nerves is that the only way that I knew to launch the blog post editor was cumbersome. I would launch Word (which would open a new empty plain old document, which I didn't need..) then hit the Office menu (the menu formerly known as File) and then click New, then wait for a big dialog to load up, then find and click on the "Blog" icon, and if I was feeling the need to be tidy I would Alt-Tab, Ctrl-F4 to close that unneeded plain document…. Whew. The problem for me had become that I was having a hard time putting those comfy shoes on – I needed a shoehorn… or should I say, a shortcut.

Here's how (props to the help file, which I plagiarized liberally J ):

First, you must verify the location of the Winword.exe file on your computer. If you accepted the default folder locations when you installed Word, the Winword.exe file is probably located at:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\Winword.exe

If you do not find the Winword.exe file at that location, search for the file and make a note of the full path.

1. Right-click the Windows desktop, point to New, and then click Shortcut.
2. In the Type the location of the item box, type the full path for the Winword.exe file (including the file name), or click Browse to locate it. Note that since the path most likely includes spaces you need to enclose it in quotes.
3. Here's the special bit - At the end of the path you are going to add a switch and a parameter: type a space, and then add "/t" followed by the full filepath and name of the Blog template, enclosed in quotes. For example, with Office installed to the default location the full text in the Type the location of the item box should be:

"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE12\WINWORD.EXE" /t"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Templates\1033\Blog.dotx"

1. Click Next.
2. In the Type a name for this shortcut box, type a name for the shortcut (I suggest something useful, such as "New Blog Post"), and then click Finish.

The shortcut appears on the desktop.

1. Whenever you want to start Word in this particular customized way, double-click the shortcut.
2. To add the desktop shortcut to the Start menu in Windows, right-click the shortcut, and then click Pin to Start menu on the shortcut menu.
3. For extra style points: right-click-and-hold, drag, drop, copy the desktop shortcut to other handy locations such as the Quick Launch toolbar in the Taskbar, or into the Links toolbar in Internet Explorer. (Here's where that shortcut name you selected back at step 5 comes in very handy, it shows up in the tooltip of the shortcut icon and the text of the button, respectively.)

Ah, that's better!