In my last post, I was talking about how I was trying out Windows live writer to see if it would be something worth using or just blogging the old fashioned way which is through the admin panel. Well I’m still not sure myself, it’s a good program to use but I am having a few tiny issues that make me not want to fully use it all the time.

One of the issues I have is that when I press the return key to start writing on a new line, well, it doesn’t write on a new line. Instead, it just double spaces between the words so I am forced to go into the admin panel on my site and correct this through there. Why is this a huge issue? Well, what’s the point in downloading software that lets you blog from your desktop instead of having to log into your account when in the end, you still have to log into your blog and correct the mistakes.

The other major issue I have with this is the spell checker, it doesn’t check all the words right away as you type like Microsoft Word does with the red and green underlines. This is one thing that I thought this would have considering it’s from Microsoft but no. The spell checking method in this is to select spell check from the tools menu, call me stupid but it honestly bugs me. I just had a quick look through the settings and noticed that the squiggly option for the spell checker is ticked but it just really is not working for me.

Another tiny issues I have is at the bottom of the program are three tabs, a edit tab, preview tab and a source tab. Now, please let me know if I have these things mixed up but I am blogging through the source tab as it has all the usual features like categorizing, tagging etc etc.. The preview tab just doesn’t work for me but I think that’s due to the theme I am using, all I can see is the navigation bars and no content what so ever, not that I really need this but it would be nice to be able to preview everything before I post it. As for the edit tab, well, I would tell you what it’s for but because of issues (with the theme I’m guessing), I can’t do anything with it.

Ok, they are the bad points, now I’ll get to the good points.

First off, the toolbar layout in this is similar to Word 2003 which is nice to have so you know where everything is, you have the alignment tool, bold, italic, underline buttons and heading options so it was nice to see a familiar interface.

On the right hand side, you basically have everything you will need when it comes to writing a new post, a hyper linking option, picture options, video options, tags, tables and even a "add a plug-in" option. I find this extremely helpful and a brilliant feature.

Just under the three tabs I mentioned earlier are the category choices for you put your post in, the tags section for you to add tags to the post and even a publish date so you can tell it when you publish the post.

These good points are actually brilliant points and make it an excellent piece of software in my opinion but because of the little issues I wrote about, I’m still not fully willing to use this all the time yet. I hope that in some way you find this review a little helpful, I recommend it all the way but I just find it a bit annoying with things because of my personal preferences, nothing to do with any kind of bugs or what so ever. Overall, the software is brilliant, you can go ahead and download it from here, if you use it, I hope everything works out ok for you and hope I helped!

:]