Well, that was a very underwhelming experience. First of all, the WYSIWYG editor doesn’t work at all in Chrome (or Firefox, or Safari, or any other web browser, besides IE). Second of all, these are the options I have after switching to IE:

So what do we have there?

• Cut, Copy and Paste
• Clear Formatting
• Undo and Redo
• Insert Table and 4 table maintenance buttons
• Insert HTML link
• Insert Picture
• Edit HTML code
• Font and Font size
• Bold, Italic and Underline
• Left, center and right alignment
• Numbered and bulleted lists
• Indent and Unindent
• Text color, Highlight color
• Left-to-right and Right-to-left

And this is what I have in the WordPress editor:

Which is:

• Upload/Insert Image, Video, Audio, Media, Gravity Form (the last one through a plug-in)
• Bold, Italic, Strikethrough (hey, no underline? Wait for it)
• Bulleted and numbered lists
• Quoted text
• Left, center and right align
• Create or break link
• Insert “more” tag
• Spellcheck toggle and language selector
• Toggle for full screen mode
• Kitchen sink switch (“on” to display the second row of icons)
• Formatting (H1-H6, Paragraph, Address and Preformatted)
• Underline (Ah!)
• Align Full
• Select Text color
• Paste as:
  • Plain text
  • From Word
  • Remove formatting
• Insert/Edit embedded media
• Insert Custom character
• Indent/Unindent
• Undo/Redo
• Help
• Google Wave (through a plugin)

So, a free product like WordPress has very comparable features, and manages to work with pretty much every browser – no discrimination or Tier 1/Tier 2 distinctions. And on top of that, allows extensions to enhance and expand the standard toolbar.

There are so many WYSIWYG editors available, how come Microsoft decides to ignore half of the users in the world, even though they claim that in Sharepoint 2007 “new features such as wikis, blogs, and RSS would make us very attractive for Internet facing sites.” Not if you’re not supporting more than your own bug-riddled browser. And how about updating that functionality in the 4 years it has been out now, and the browser landscape has changed considerably?

Nice going, multi-billion dollar company. But since this is Microsoft, I’m afraid this will be our corporate standard… sigh…