Stacy Draper’s Favorites Add-In for Word

I author all of my blog posts in Word 2007. Why? Well, first, I’m in Word all the time anyway and it’s a familiar environment; second, the blog template allows me to work offline and compose my posts for uploading later; and finally, because the formatting (especially of code blocks) is much closer to what SharePoint uses in the WSS blog site definition. I do get frustrated, though, especially when I constantly have to look through my favorites in IE to get the blog URL’s for other MVP’s and SharePoint bloggers while creating a new post. I swear I spend more time cutting and pasting URL’s than I do actually writing anything of any value (some would argue that there really isn’t any value at all, but they’re mostly admin types and can’t be held accountable for their ignorance).

So I was cursing my miserable situation at TechEd Developer Week within earshot of fellow MVP Stacy Draper and he felt so sorry for me (or was just tired of my bellyaching, I’m not sure which) that he decided to do something about it. Stacy walked over to the Visual Studio 2008 TLC stand, fired up VS and started coding away. Over the next couple of days (with an able assist from Mike Houston) he whipped up a Word add-in that shows all my IE favorites in a tool pane. I can expand the SharePoint Bloggers folder, find the blog I want to link to, copy and insert the URL. This may sound trivial but it saves me a TON of time.

If this interests you, Stacy has posted the project to CodePlex here. Mike suggested an enhancement to display links from a WSS site as well, which would be crazy cool, so if you have the time and inclination, download the source code and add some killer code to the project. And if you see Stacy wandering about (as he is wont to do), buy that man a beer – he deserves it!

Thanks, Stacy – SHAREPOINT NATION!!!