How to Download, Install and Configure Windows Live Writer?

Windows Live Writer is one of the useful live essential tools provided by Microsoft. Though the prominence for them, after releasing Windows 8 has reduced to half, the prominence for WLW is never lost.

Windows Live Writer is my favorite blogging tool as it provides WYSIWYG user interface to blog. Take a look at the following screenshot and you will understand why.


Isn’t that quite good if we could blog using such a transparent environment?

Let’s see how to download Windows Live Writer to your Windows computer.

Downloading & Installing Windows Live Writer

Step 1: Go to Windows Live Essentials website and click ‘Download Now’ button. A web installer will be downloaded on to your computer(with a name ‘wlsetup-web.exe’).

Step 2: Run the program and you would see a screen asking to choose what to install.

Step 3: Choosing ‘Install all of Windows Essentials’ will install all the windows live essential programs. Choosing the other, ‘Choose the programs you want to install’ will install programs that you are going to chose in next step.

Step 4: Let’s choose the second option to see what other unnecessary programs are installing along with Windows Live Writer.

Step 5: Choose Windows Live Writer under ‘These programs will be installed’. In my case, I have already installed some of the programs. You can choose to install more than one program among the available list.

Step 6: Select the wanted programs and click ‘Install’.

Wait for a while till the installation completes. After installation is over, open Windows Live Writer and configure it with your blog as shown below.

Configuring Windows Live Writer

Step 1: Open Windows Live Writer and navigate to Options.

Step 2: Go to Accounts options and then click Add. Choose your blog provider and click Next.

Step 3: Then you will see the following window asking you to enter the blog URL, username and password of the account associated to that blog.

Step 4: Wait till your blog authentication completes and the downloading of the current template structure on your blog is being downloaded.

Once it is done, it is done! You are then good to go. You can now start writing your blog posts using this wonderful tool. You will even leave Microsoft Word for blogging if you get used to it.

Hope that helped you make blogging easier than before!

Note: Windows Live Writer will no allow you to text-in your own custom search description. So, after writing the post, add the labels and post it as draft. Log in to your blogger dashboard later and do the SEO part there.

You need to read this:

It is essential to save your drafts safely somewhere on your computer rather than leaving them to save in default Windows Live Writer directory, as there is a chance of loosing them whenever you change your operating system.