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Show HN: Version Control for Microsoft Word

simuldocs.com

21–30 of 118 posts

Re: Show HN: Version Control for Microsoft Word

#21
Finally someone is doing this! I've been toying with the idea myself but haven't been able to dedicate time to it, mostly I was deterred by the MS Word format mess. I'm sure it wasn't fun making this work with a 21st century versioning system.

I'm sure lots of people will happily throw money at you for this!

Re: Show HN: Version Control for Microsoft Word

#22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think people who already use git and latex are the target audience for this.

Then they shouldn't market based on it.

I agree. Git / version control is too complicated for most people. Doesn't Microsoft have its own collaborative editing / version control system in Office365 yet?

Re: Show HN: Version Control for Microsoft Word

#23
post #2

So Google Docs? It seems close enough. What's the main advantage over Google Docs?

The addition of tags/versions is something that I would kill for in Google Docs. It would make life so much easier in my current role if we had the ability to tag a version so that you can easily see a diff between that specific, tagged version and the current version (rather than just seeing diffs over time as it is currently implemented).

Re: Show HN: Version Control for Microsoft Word

#26

How big do you think the intersection is of people who can use git and people who want to use Microsoft Word?

Want to? Near zero. Have to? Maybe a bit larger, hard to say.

As much as I hate having to work in Word for small things that could so easily be a plain-text format, the versioning system within Word isn't exactly the worst thing ever.

Re: Show HN: Version Control for Microsoft Word

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then they shouldn't market based on it.

I agree. Git / version control is too complicated for most people. Doesn't Microsoft have its own collaborative editing / version control system in Office365 yet?

Office365 does have versioning. I'm not going to say this is better or worse, but it does exist.

Re: Show HN: Version Control for Microsoft Word

#28
The group of people who still do their day-to-day by passing around Word docs via email or LAN likely does not intersect well with the people who fully understand (or have much less heard of) Git.

Thus, I'd remove pretty much all mention of Git from your project landing page (except perhaps to say that it was inspired by its success in the programming world to manage a similar need) so as not to scare off your likely target market (lawyers... who are ALSO notoriously Luddite!)

Re: Show HN: Version Control for Microsoft Word

#30

How big do you think the intersection is of people who can use git and people who want to use Microsoft Word?

It includes at least me :) I switched to Latex for writing my second master thesis because I wanted to use version control but Word is far more easier to deal with when the document include unicode character outside the BMP. So I really wanted Word + git from that time.

Also when collaborating for writing a paper with Word, version control can be a huge help.

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