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Ask HN: “Git” for Microsoft Office?

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Re: Ask HN: “Git” for Microsoft Office?

#141

Post by prepend »

dahauns wrote: post #59
prepend wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Versioning is good for restoring backups, it’s hard for seeing changes over time. I recently worked on a word doc with four other collaborators. Someone inserted a footnote. Looking through versions it took me 10 minutes of sifting through the dozens of versions (auto save creates new versions very frequently) to find who and when that section changes. I wish there was a git blame for office. I also wish the old day…

>I wish there was a git blame for office. That's exactly what "Track changes" is for.

Track changes can’t be turned on and off to replay versions. There is compare document, but it takes longer and is one version at a time.

Blame goes through the entire history of a file.

Re: Ask HN: “Git” for Microsoft Office?

#142

Post by wenc »

exidy wrote: post #132
wenc wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like many commenters here haven't used Office 365 and may have outdated ideas of what Office is capable of these days (it ain't Office 2010).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…

That’s interesting——I regularly collaborate with 30+ users and have yet to see a merge conflict.

Is it possible you’re using a older version of Sharepoint that isn’t collaboration aware? I know in older versions of Sharepoint, documents get checked out and locked all the time. Are you able to do live editing? If you aren’t, we might talking about different versions here.

With Office 365 and Sharepoint 2016, I was under the impression that collaboration uses operational transformations (like Google Docs) or CRDTs rather than continuous merging —- which isn’t feasible for real-time live editing anyway. Unresolvable conflicts are rare because the merge is happening at the action level, not document level.

The experience in Office 365 has been similar to Google Suite for me.

Re: Ask HN: “Git” for Microsoft Office?

#143

Post by wenc »

srazzaque wrote: post #128
bane wrote: post #96

Use sharepoint, office365, and Teams. It versions, it supports collaborative editing, no more mailing things around, and so on.

Agreed. The only caveat I'd offer is, for MS Word specifically, you can have: (1) Large complex documents (i.e. lots of links/references, sections) OR (2) Many collaborators. Pick ONE. If you must have both of these, leave track changes off, and use highlights and comments. I've been in the unfortunate position of being next to a deadline, where the word document was the key deliverable. And then having that document…

From my perspective, Office 365 today has an identical experience to GSuite with respect to collaboration.

We regularly edit complex documents with large numbers of collaborators. Track changes and collaboration are different though (the former has been around since time immemorial but collaboration only came out a couple of years ago)

Re: Ask HN: “Git” for Microsoft Office?

#144

Post by basch »

prepend wrote: post #140
basch wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I tend to use search a lot.

It's much much faster to open Excel and type a couple characters of the filename into the File > Open search field, than it is to navigate structures.

Re: Ask HN: “Git” for Microsoft Office?

#145

Post by brirec »

wiseleo wrote: post #121

One aspect I find interesting is the need for ransomware protection. Looking into a way to automatically make git commits whenever a file is added or modified in a directory. The idea is to make it transparent to user, but possible for an admin to undo whatever damage they may have caused. I am not certain whether tortoisegit by itself can accomplish this. One repo would be local and another somewhere in the cloud.

I haven't tried it, but gitfs (https://github.com/presslabs/gitfs) sounds nice.

Re: Ask HN: “Git” for Microsoft Office?

#146

Post by mmerlin »

taffit wrote: post #67

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…

The forked version which is an Addin runs about 4x faster, and is actively being developed now

https://github.com/joyfullservice/msaccess-vcs-integration

Re: Ask HN: “Git” for Microsoft Office?

#148

Post by exidy »

wenc wrote: post #142
exidy wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That’s interesting——I regularly collaborate with 30+ users and have yet to see a merge conflict. Is it possible you’re using a older version of Sharepoint that isn’t collaboration aware? I know in older versions of Sharepoint, documents get checked out and locked all the time. Are you able to do live editing? If you aren’t, we might talking about different versions here. With Office 365 and Sharepoint 2016, I was und…

Using Office 365 SharePoint and the latest versions of the native apps.

Re: Ask HN: “Git” for Microsoft Office?

#149

Post by wenc »

exidy wrote: post #148
wenc wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s interesting——I regularly collaborate with 30+ users and have yet to see a merge conflict. Is it possible you’re using a older version of Sharepoint that isn’t collaboration aware? I know in older versions of Sharepoint, documents get checked out and locked all the time. Are you able to do live editing? If you aren’t, we might talking about different versions here. With Office 365 and Sharepoint 2016, I was und…

Using Office 365 SharePoint and the latest versions of the native apps.

Fascinating. Not sure why then. But then again doc wide changes are rare for me and my team so maybe that’s the difference.
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