In my team we have been using svn/totortoisesvn to store our word documents. It integrates nicely with word’s doc compare.
Ask HN: “Git” for Microsoft Office?
81–90 of 149 posts
Re: Ask HN: “Git” for Microsoft Office?
#82O365 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...
I find if I enable edit permissions, people can do more than suggest changes, they can make them. An editor can turn off tracking, that has to be done frequently to fix formatting and layout issues, and changes aren’t visibly tracked. I wish there was a “pull request” for office with a permission that allowed suggestions but not edits.
This sounds great... in theory. But has a pull request feature ever been created for a non-plain text format?
Intuitively, this doesn't really seem possible to me for a sophisticated document format. E.g., how would you represent a change to an embedded graph in a pull request? (And would that same approach scale to any form of embedded media?)
Re: Ask HN: “Git” for Microsoft Office?
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
My wife is a laywer and she and her colleagues (and the other lawyers they are working with) pretty much base their workflow for revising documents on track changes. I've never heard her complain about it.
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.
> where and when a change was done, by whom, and with the reasoning sometimes added
On Office 365 at least, it does tell you all of those things.
Re: Ask HN: “Git” for Microsoft Office?
#84Technically, 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…
> as there would be a massive market for a DVCS for Office files 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 wo…
People get that mailing revisions of documents back and forth feels rickety. In my immediate circle I noticed that people some mild amazement that geeks use Wiki-style collaboration environments instead of office suites.
Re: Ask HN: “Git” for Microsoft Office?
#85> I can’t believe non-geeks have lived like this for 30 years. Given how shitty MS software has always been, I can't believe people not only pay money for it but also accept it as the norm. As for your question, non-geeks have been coping with this by saving a copy of a document before each edit so that when the inevitable catastrophe occurs, they can roll back. As a geek, you can use git manually. Adding that as a f…
Ah yes, I love working out which is the most recent document out of:
* Document1 FINAL
* Document1 FINAL DRAFT (DO NOT EDIT)
* Document1 FINAL EDITED
* Document1 v2 FINAL
Re: Ask HN: “Git” for Microsoft Office?
#86Re: Ask HN: “Git” for Microsoft Office?
#87O365 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...
My understanding is that collaborative live editing à la Google Docs was already here for Microsoft Office? E.g., I routinely edit the same Excel file from my iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
My current understanding is that live collaborative editing is the solution for the same problem version control solves for non-plain text file formats (and therefore, also the solution for non-programmers). Think of how much programmers complain about the complexity of git, and that's using it with plain text, a format that facilitates version control like no other.
For collaborating in every document format that isn't plain text, my solution has been to use live collaborative editing.
Re: Ask HN: “Git” for Microsoft Office?
#88Snipply[1] is a great option for you. It will be released shortly!
It allows you to create "Cards" or snippets of any size, of any part of the document, and save it, version it, and sync it with any other document. Even with documents in Google apps (Docs, and Sheets). A Card can be a sentence, paragraph, or entire document, up to you.
Disclaimer: I'm the CTO of its parent company.
Re: Ask HN: “Git” for Microsoft Office?
#89You might consider encouraging people to write markdown and then generate the final document using pandoc with an msword stylesheet. This is what I did in college because (for some reason) everyone expects word files for everything.
Thays Why I use markdown and latex for everything. I was back in college 2 years ago, after 15 years. DOing mechanichal engeneer. All my reports where writen on markdown and latex, and saved on gitlab.
Now days I use asciidoc mostly because there’s an official spec and latex math and bibliography are included. Every markdown is different and that’s pretty frustrating sometimes.
Re: Ask HN: “Git” for Microsoft Office?
#90Track changes works for Word. Still no solution for Excel.
One thing that can make things better is to teach people to use Styles correctly.