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First point. MS office documents have a vaguely capable version control system built in. It's not Git, but it may be enough. Second point, I haven't tested thi
by Intermernet 6y ago
First point. MS office documents have a vaguely capable version control system built in. It's not Git, but it may be enough.
Second point, I haven't tested this, but docx, xlsx etc are XML based and may be happily Git compatible.
Third point, if the above doesn't work, look into automatically saving / converting documents into and out of a Git compatible format with minimal loss of formatting etc. You may be able to convince your team that this is an acceptable compromise between the tools they are used to, and the power of DVCS.
- i0nutzb 6y agoDocx & co are XML based, but they are _zipped_, therefore binary. Which make a version control pretty much impossible.
- ies7 6y agoI never try, but I thought you just need to rename the .docx/.xlsx/.pptx to .zip, unpack them then do the version control on that files?
- Piskvorrr 6y agoThat works. It's clumsy, but can be automated.
- saurik 6y agoI mean, git supports applying filters on the file for exactly this purpose? The content that is being compressed is likely going to still diff poorly, but git also supports custom differs for example that purpose, so I don't know why you are saying "impossible".
- gspr 6y ago> I mean, git supports applying filters on the file for exactly this purpose? Indeed, pass (https://www.passwordstore.org/ https://www.passwordstore.org/) uses this to allow diffing and sane tracking of its password files, even though they are binary encrypted GPG blobs.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- rleigh 6y agoThat's what "flat" OpenDocument files are for. Use .fotd, .fods and then you can have all the file content, plus referenced images, objects etc. all separate files under version control without the zip container. I do this with LibreOffice. I've not tested Microsoft Office with this workflow.