Microsoft Teams?!
Ask HN: “Git” for Microsoft Office?
41–50 of 149 posts
Re: Ask HN: “Git” for Microsoft Office?
#42An underused feature in MS Word is 'Compare documents' - It's under the Review tab on the ribbon as 'Compare'. It allows you to do a 'diff' style compare on two Word documents - it's invaluable for working out what changed between versions if the place you are working at doesn't have any other document tracking systems.
Re: Ask HN: “Git” for Microsoft Office?
#43This might not be exactly what you're asking for but I'll just leave it here in case someone finds it useful: A couple years back I built this: https://github.com/tomashubelbauer/modern-office-git-diff It is a pre-commit script which unpacks Office XML into text contents and tracks that alongside the source file. This way you can consider the binary to be a source of truth, but with each commit you also get a textual…
This feature now built into Word, and has been for some time. see my other comment in this thread.
Re: Ask HN: “Git” for Microsoft Office?
#44Something to help is coming in the form of Fluid. https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/19/21260005/microsoft-office... https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/get-started-with-...
This looks very interesting but I doubt large enterprises will allow it considering the online nature and the inability to secure confidential work on internally hosted systems.
Re: Ask HN: “Git” for Microsoft Office?
#45Takeover more power and then move people to markdown with a sleight of hand. I cannot cope with MS Office anymore. I was in finance 5 years, plenty of Excel work, when I open Excel today I am quickly reminded how painful it is and go back to Python.
Re: Ask HN: “Git” for Microsoft Office?
#46I mean, this is what Office 365 does - and pretty well: collaboration and versioning.
Versioning is good for restoring backups, it’s hard for seeing changes over time.
I recently worked on a word doc with four other collaborators. Someone inserted a footnote. Looking through versions it took me 10 minutes of sifting through the dozens of versions (auto save creates new versions very frequently) to find who and when that section changes.
I wish there was a git blame for office.
I also wish the old day of “checked in” versions where I could set a number and a comment.
Re: Ask HN: “Git” for Microsoft Office?
#47This might not be exactly what you're asking for but I'll just leave it here in case someone finds it useful: A couple years back I built this: https://github.com/tomashubelbauer/modern-office-git-diff It is a pre-commit script which unpacks Office XML into text contents and tracks that alongside the source file. This way you can consider the binary to be a source of truth, but with each commit you also get a textual…
This feature now built into Word, and has been for some time. see my other comment in this thread.
Sure, it's probably better to use that if you don't mind that. I am big on plain-text files and Git and sometimes I have to bend reality a little bit in order to keep working my way when others won't. This is one of those cases.
Re: Ask HN: “Git” for Microsoft Office?
#48Office365 has version history. You can flip back and forwards and see the changes any other collaborator has made. You can set the history to be pretty deep too:
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/enable-and-configur...
Re: Ask HN: “Git” for Microsoft Office?
#49First point. MS office documents have a vaguely capable version control system built in. It's not Git, but it may be enough. Second point, I haven't tested this, but docx, xlsx etc are XML based and may be happily Git compatible. Third point, if the above doesn't work, look into automatically saving / converting documents into and out of a Git compatible format with minimal loss of formatting etc. You may be able to…
Docx & co are XML based, but they are _zipped_, therefore binary. Which make a version control pretty much impossible.
That's what "flat" OpenDocument files are for. Use .fotd, .fods and then you can have all the file content, plus referenced images, objects etc. all separate files under version control without the zip container.
I do this with LibreOffice. I've not tested Microsoft Office with this workflow.
Re: Ask HN: “Git” for Microsoft Office?
#50I wrote this comment in response to a deleted comment that said something like “use SharePoint.”
I find that most office users can’t use SharePoint. There’s too many things that are confusing or don’t work as expected, so it’s rare to find a business user who can set up SharePoint sites or workflows or even document organization.
So I’ve seen “SharePoint developers” who are consultants who know what to click and configure.
If I’m going to have to hire special people to make web sites, I’d rather just hire more technical people who can code something or tie together products. SharePoint developers cost the same as Wordpress developers to me.
The big advantage, I think, for collaboration software is to have contributors work directly with each other. Having to go through a secretary to convert work to some special format eats up the big benefits from stuff like SharePoint.