Ask HN: “Git” for Microsoft Office?

I’ve recently changed job and now I am basically swamped in MSOffice documents. This makes collaboration very hard: people are fearful you’ll touch their precious files, there are manual procedures to produce “gold” documents, fixing a typo is an ordeal, and if the same slide is present in 15 Powerpoint decks any edit will require tons of mindless and error-prone copypasting... it made me realize how good developers have it with git, github, and the likes.

Is there anything out there, capable of working with MSOffice stuff in a granular and collaborative way? I can’t believe non-geeks have lived like this for 30 years.

Office 365?

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...

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 a world where every bill in Congress was committed to a central repo so the whole world could see the changes, or where someone in your team wants to play with the formatting on a shared requirements document without breaking the page you’re writing on. It would be a boon for productivity.

.docx is plain text xml though (You can even save explicitly as .xml which has all the images in base64).

Is track changes not good enough?