71–80 of 149 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Collaborative editing is supported by the desktop apps as well - I use it in Word a lot and it works pretty well. Your document has to hosted in SP online though.
Or Onedrive.
O365 has had live editing for a while now[1], it's not even that hard to use. You can have that Golden Version and everyone can suggest changes and edits, then the document owner can accept or decline the edits. [1]: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Collaborate-on-Word...
Sadly, our Sharepoint implementation is "in progress", so $deity knows when we'll be able to use this consistently... Thanks anyway, I guess it's my only option.
>if the same slide is present in 15 Powerpoint decks any edit will require tons of mindless and error-prone copypasting
This is exactly what you want SharePoint for. Have 15 people open the same PowerPoint deck, in desktop PowerPoint, editing the file simultaneously. It's fully versioned and you have no merging of files back together.
I 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 conf…
Document organization will be a problem wherever you settle. What are your abstractions, what are your folders, who can create what at what level.
For MS Access files there exists a project ([1], last activity in 2018) which basically splits the file into its components (like forms, queries, macros etc.) which you can then check into your VCS. This way, single versions of an MS-Access-file are diffable to previous versions and you can track exactly what has been done... in a developer fashioned way, though. If you would need an exact version, you can build this…
However, you can't really used them to dump the current database, and they don't both appear to be used in timabell's work for a quick glance.
The loader method even allows for the lighter-weight Forms from the other Office applications to be pulled into Access, though the motive for using them would not be clear.
My intent had been to write an Excel macro workbook as a manager tool, and use it to manage Access Dbs in git.
I have a library I call "The NecroVisualBasiCon" out in GitHub that I'll share if anyone is interested in peering into an abyss.
Technically, tracked changes and SharePoint. But in practice, you’d rather send the changes to the project owner via carrier pigeon. I’ve looked into what it would take to make a git style system for docx (since it’s just zipped XML, right :D), and the file format was a nightmare whenever an edit was made. Someone smart should take a look at it, as there would be a massive market for a DVCS for Office files. Imagine…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe she is used to it? I have used track changes and it is good and all ... but it may not be exactly the same as being able to know where and when a change was done, by whom, and with the reasoning sometimes added with it that comes from VCSs like SVN and GIT.
I think that's the point - if you use these things expecting them to work like a revision control system for code you'll be disappointed and frustrated. Meanwhile, people who have no such expectations cope perfectly well.
You know how they do that right, stay in online chats and ask who, how, why, when. Awful waste of efforts
Technically, tracked changes and SharePoint. But in practice, you’d rather send the changes to the project owner via carrier pigeon. I’ve looked into what it would take to make a git style system for docx (since it’s just zipped XML, right :D), and the file format was a nightmare whenever an edit was made. Someone smart should take a look at it, as there would be a massive market for a DVCS for Office files. Imagine…
Would there, though? I mean, we HN readers want that, but I don't see any evidence that the average Office user is clamoring for it. Even comparatively crude systems like Track Changes aren't used in my experience as often as they could be, and those are a hundred times easier for non-technical people to wrap their minds around than a Git-like system would be.
I suspect that part of the reason this problem is so intractable is that it's really two problems. The first is actually tracking the changes to the underlying document, which, as you note, is hard enough by itself. But then on top of that is the second problem, which is that you'd also have to come up with an interface that could make the power of a Git-like system comprehensible to non-technical users. And you'd need to solve both problems to have a product that would actually be ready to take to market.
Nongeeks haven't been living with this. They (mostly lawyers) use document management version control systems like iManage ( https://imanage.com/product/document-email-management/ ) and professional comparison software like Workshare Compare https://www.litera.com/products/legal/workshare-compare/ (orders of magnitude better than tracked changes in Word though Word has gotten better over the years).
This is the sort of answer I was hoping for. Workshare-Compare looks pretty cool (if not cheap).
Part of my company uses SAP for their doc control, part of my company uses MasterControl. I hate hate hate SAP. I have a few bones to pick with Master Control, but overall, it's tolerable. If you'd like to chat more about how this process works in the workplace, you can find me on twitter @failbridge or on reddit as /u/daveslash
This 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…
You can do that with pandoc[1] as a git diff-viewer[2] too.
[2] https://github.com/vigente/gerardus/wiki/Integrate-git-diffs...