Users of Google's free blog service, Blogger, can now can post to their blogs directly from inside Microsoft Word via Blogger for Word, a free downloadable add-in, Google announced last week, Microsoft Watch reports. After it's installed, three additional buttons appear on the Word toolbar - Publish, Open Post, and Save As Draft - allowing users to publish new posts, open and edit their last 15 posts, and save posts without publishing them.

To use the add-in, users must have a free Blogger account and run both Windows 2000 and Word 2000 or higher. No Mac-supported version is available, and the add-in does not support images, tables or "some of the wackier formatting in Word," according to Jason Shellen, Pyra Founder and Google product manager.

Blogger was developed by Pyra Labs in 1999 and became part of Google when it acquired Pyra in 2003.