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Show HN: Diffs of Word documents, designed for humans

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Show HN: Diffs of Word documents, designed for humans

#1

Post by bentoner »

We're building version control software for Microsoft Office documents that works as well as Git and GitHub do for code.

Today, we’re releasing the first component, Draftable for Word, an Office add-in that lets you generate side-by-side diffs, and makes it way less painful to work with Track Changes.

Our diffs are designed to look right to humans — instead of machines — showing changes as they might actually have been made by an editor.

We'd love to hear your feedback. We’d also love to fix what you find painful about authoring and collaborating on Microsoft Office documents, so get in touch!

https://draftable.com

Re: Show HN: Diffs of Word documents, designed for humans

#5

Post by estebank »

markokocic wrote: post #3

How is this different from what "git --diff" provides out of the box for .docx documents?

The overlap of Word users and git users is small enough that it makes sense to create a simple to use tool for what is essentially the same task.

Re: Show HN: Diffs of Word documents, designed for humans

#6

Post by ozh »

You're 2 years late, I've finished writing my book!

Joke aside, I think that's awesome. While writing a book and getting feedback from lots of people (tech review, copy review, etc..) it slowly became a nightmare to decipher, more than actually read, Word documents full of colorful revisions. I would have seriously loved a tool like this.

Re: Show HN: Diffs of Word documents, designed for humans

#7

Post by bentoner »

georgecmu wrote: post #4

Right now it's only available for Windows version of Office 2010. Any plans to release it for Mac or for older Office versions?

It works on Office 2007 too.

We have no current plans to do 2003 (too many hacks required!) but we could potentially do a Mac version if it turns out that we've made something people want.

Re: Show HN: Diffs of Word documents, designed for humans

#8

Post by lucb1e »

I could have used this in the past three months! I suppose after summer I might put it to use again during school. I haven't tried it yet, but the title sounds very promising. Nice work!

PS. Heads up: Mind the guidelines:

> "Don't abuse the text field in the submission form to add commentary to links. The text field is for starting discussions. If you're submitting a link, put it in the url field. If you want to add initial commentary on the link, write a blog post about it and submit that instead."

Re: Show HN: Diffs of Word documents, designed for humans

#10

Post by bentoner »

lucb1e wrote: post #8

I could have used this in the past three months! I suppose after summer I might put it to use again during school. I haven't tried it yet, but the title sounds very promising. Nice work! PS. Heads up: Mind the guidelines: > "Don't abuse the text field in the submission form to add commentary to links. The text field is for starting discussions. If you're submitting a link, put it in the url field. If you want to add…

Oh, whoops; I won't do that again. It's the first time I've done a Show HN and we're still setting up our blog. I can't seem to edit it to change it into a link with URL.
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