Basically we should use OneDrive/SharePoint. For comparing just Excel files, WinMerge is my mate.
Ask HN: “Git” for Microsoft Office?
131–140 of 149 posts
Re: Ask HN: “Git” for Microsoft Office?
#132Use sharepoint, office365, and Teams. It versions, it supports collaborative editing, no more mailing things around, and so on.
Sounds like many commenters here haven't used Office 365 and may have outdated ideas of what Office is capable of these days (it ain't Office 2010). Of course one can't do a pull request with Office (non-geeks would struggle with the idea anyway) but live-editing of shared documents and version history is now built-in. If two or more people open the same .docx/.pptx/.xlsx from a shared environment (Sharepoint/Teams/O…
The above is true, but there are caveats. Under the hood, Office is constantly saving back to Sharepoint and trying to merge changes. If it can't merge changes it will simply alert the user and give the option of abandoning their changes or saving them locally for manual merge later.
In my experience, merging seems to fail more often with Excel and PowerPoint than Word, but even in Word applying doc-wide changes (e.g. change of language) while someone else edits usually fails.
For sequential editing it works fine and keeps an automatic version history.
Re: Ask HN: “Git” for Microsoft Office?
#133Yes. Store the document on OneDrive. Give people a link to the document and you can all collaborate on the same document in real time. Onedrive also has version history so you can revert / see / compare previous versions
Re: Ask HN: “Git” for Microsoft Office?
#134If I understand correctly, this might be of some use - Git LFS.
An open source Git extension for versioning large files https://git-lfs.github.com/
Re: Ask HN: “Git” for Microsoft Office?
#135Use sharepoint, office365, and Teams. It versions, it supports collaborative editing, no more mailing things around, and so on.
With sharepoint and onedrive I struggled to coordinate when someone edits/commits. With git you do the change and PR. Office has no concept of someone merging changes. My $0.02: just use git?
> just use git?
Sounds good in theory - now imagine explaining to a group of regular office workers concept of commits, merges, pull requests, whole workflow and additional software for doing all of this. It's just not possible.
Re: Ask HN: “Git” for Microsoft Office?
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
15 people opening the same deck is not the same as 15 people opening 15 different decks that have just one slide in common.
Google has this feature and it's a damn nightmare. If someone edits a deck but doesn't have permissions to the deck a linked slide is from, the link breaks. Also, changes made only flow one direction (master -> copies). There's basically no repeatable way to use it across multiple contexts. Slideware is not the same as modular code.
These are Google-specific implementation issue, there is no philosophical reason why a single slide could not be a modular, referenceable object. I bet the old COM stuff could do it (of course it would then break if the document was moved, but again, these are implementation-specific bugs).
Re: Ask HN: “Git” for Microsoft Office?
#137If it’s word you can use word itself as a diff tool to compare different versions. I guess just track versions in Git and you”re done.
Re: Ask HN: “Git” for Microsoft Office?
#138Technically, 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…
> I mean, we HN readers want that, but I don't see any evidence that the average Office user is clamoring for it.
My current experience is that non-geeks have no idea that another way of life is even possible. You won't clamor for something you cannot even conceive.
I bet that tons of orgs would rush to adopt a github-style workflow if MS made it available. After trying out the "Track changes" and collaborative modes people have mentioned here, I can see why people in my company don't use them - they are flaky and don't really enforce rights, they basically just nudge the user.
Re: Ask HN: “Git” for Microsoft Office?
#139Check https://www.simuldocs.com/ It's a version control SaaS for Word documents. They took a lot of inspiration from git
This is actually the best suggestion of the bunch, at the moment, at least for the most critical Word documents we have. It's cheap enough that I can try to sell it internally with minimal effort. It even has a readonly api that I could use to package the final versions of this or that. The only weakness for my usecase is the lack of support for Powerpoint, which hopefully will come at some point.
Re: Ask HN: “Git” for Microsoft Office?
#140I 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…
You dont ever even need to see SharePoint. People create groups, save files to groups. Opening & Editing can all be done directly from Excel or PowerPoint. If they can use Excel and PowerPoint, they can use SharePoint the same way they save files to a network drive or local folder. Document organization will be a problem wherever you settle. What are your abstractions, what are your folders, who can create what at wh…
For me, I use SharePoint to find files to edit and collaborate on. And to put context around files so they can be found and used.
Files can be opened directly from within word or excel, but browsing a team’s SharePoint is faster than navigating Excel’s open dialog. Similar to how browsing File Explorer or Finder and then opening a file is faster.
So avoiding SharePoint isn’t very likely, I think.