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Honestly I think modern Sharepoint/OneDrive based .docx files have already leapfrogged git for the average user. In an office environment, modern MS Word gives

by D13Fd 5y ago

Honestly I think modern Sharepoint/OneDrive based .docx files have already leapfrogged git for the average user. In an office environment, modern MS Word gives you a really nice version history, with automatic or manual/named versions, plus multi-user simultaneous editing, with a slick and fast UI. It’s even cross platform - I send a coworker a link to a document, and they can open it and work on Word for Windows while I edit the same doc on Word for Mac or even on the web-based Word. It’s shockingly good.

xerox13ster 5y ago
That's not plain text and not easily parse-able with mutli document search
CorrectHorseBat 5y ago
After not using Word for years we've been using it for a few months now for a project, expecting it would be decent. While some of the ideas are great, the overall experience was pretty bad. Leaving autosave on often slowed down Word to an unworkable pace and after a few other issues (I'm not exactly sure what, wasn't involved) we just made sure only one person at a time works on the document. Some other annoying small issues I experienced: when working together sometimes your undo history is gone. I guess that's because someone else edited too and correctly undoing something someone else edited in between is not simple. IMO it's impossible and any system doing merges automatically will fall apart at some point. Track edits cannot track deleting rows of a table Wed based word works actually pretty fine, but it misses random features. Adding captions seems not to be supported.
- yarky 5y ago
  I agree, I also expected the whole office365 ecosystem to do what's supposed to, but I also found it useless due to the slowness and errors the whole team kept getting while working on the same file. That and the fact that it somehow feels like the Mac version of their products always comes with a bonus bug. Don't event get me started on their web versions. It's the little things...
- D13Fd 5y ago
  Were you using it on Linux or something? Or maybe with very large documents? I use it every day and really haven’t had slowness issues, even when running via Parallels on the Mac side. Of course, typically my docs are <100 pages and light on images. I have seen undo history go away when edits collide with multiple users, but that’s really the only way it could work. And you can still view old versions of the doc if you need to retrieve/restore something. MS Word as a whole is definitely very far from flawless, but it’s still better than the alternatives I’ve seen, and it’s extremely entrenched. That’s why it’s hard to see “git for office docs”succeeding.
  - CorrectHorseBat 5y ago
    >Were you using it on Linux or something? Or maybe with very large documents ~250 pages, ~100 images, not something I expect a modern computer to struggle with. We used the web version on Linux sometimes, but I think it also happened when we didn't. >I have seen undo history go away when edits collide with multiple users, but that’s really the only way it could work. And you can still view old versions of the doc if you need to retrieve/restore something. The other way is like git does it, manual merging and conflict resolving. I don't think there's a way around that once you work with enough people together on a file.
    - D13Fd 5y ago
      That makes sense, although obviously the downside to a manual check-in/merge process is that it greatly slows down the editing flow. Personally for the kinds of documents I work on, I'd rather risk losing my undo history than have to deal with manually merging changes from multiple users. Plus, without real-time concurrent editing, the changes are much more likely to conflict.
jsmith99 5y ago
Word also includes a nice GUI diffing tool for docx files. It's possible to make git diff use it using something like https://github.com/ForNeVeR/ExtDiff https://github.com/ForNeVeR/ExtDiff
- thrwawy283 5y ago
  Thank you for sharing this. I had no idea it existed! I was getting pandoc cleared at my work, but for the Windows environment that it is, this is another solution :)
thrwawy283 5y ago
Hmm. Sometimes I step back and I look at the version history in modern Office documents and it does feel convenient. I like the CRDT editing a lot. It still feels too loose and prone to issues, but I recognize its value to the average person. Most of what bothers me is trying to view, read-only a previous version. Usually I have several Word or Excel documents up on my screen, and it's easy to begin modifying a past version that then becomes the latest. It's not reflex to open a previous version and untoggle autosave. It bites me all the time.. In Office's pursuit to help people avoid losing data, I wind up overwriting what I need to preserve. A lot.. I have not seen manual version names in Word doc history. Maybe I'm sheltered :s
srazzaque 5y ago
It's great, until it isnt. For small and simple documents (sub 20 pages), there's no better option. In my experience it starts to creak on large documents with multiple editors. I did a project many years ago where the key deliverable was a large report, worked upon by 3-4 contributors over 12 weeks. That last week was absolute madness. Document got corrupted, and we tried all sorts of things. We ended up importing the corrupt document into Google Docs, which, oddly enough, did a better job of working with a corrupt Word document than MS Word did.
- jmmcd 5y ago
  I've seen online Word become extremely slow even for small documents with a few editors. It doesn't help that there are lots of versions of online Word - there's the one that lives in Sharepoint, the one I get to via Outlook, the one in Teams, and (maybe? somehow?) the desktop Word when editing an online file.
bodge5000 5y ago
I dont use word, but I do know people that do use it (the modern version) and they still have files called "...final 3 copy(4) really final.docx". These features are nice and all, but the thing is, most users not only don't care about using them, but don't care about even the idea of them to know they exist, so they continue with the old workflow. Most of the time its better to get out of the users way, but in cases like this, if you truly do want to get rid of the infinite finals, they need a bit of a nudge
wildzzz 5y ago
We use SharePoint for revisions for casual documents and another CM system for tracking releases of official documents. The CM system is meant really for CAD models but it lets you upload Word docs that it displays as PDFs with watermarked revision information so you have to have a revision table at the front of the document for listing changes. The SharePoint system is a lot easier to use but you don't get the same sort of change approval system since anyone can edit. Instead we use multiple folders for WIP, waiting for QA approval, and final versions. We have to follow ISO 9001 but anything developmental or that is just derivate of documents in the CM system can live on much more casual systems like git, SVN, or SharePoint.
zouhair 5y ago
It's a proprietary format, it's not gonna last. Microsoft word can't even open files from old version of the same software. None of these word document will be readable in 50 years from now, a text file though.
- catach 5y ago
  A modern MS Word document is pretty much zipped XML and mostly ISO standard-compliant.

by D13Fd 5y ago

xerox13ster 5y ago

That's not plain text and not easily parse-able with mutli document search

CorrectHorseBat 5y ago

After not using Word for years we've been using it for a few months now for a project, expecting it would be decent. While some of the ideas are great, the overall experience was pretty bad. Leaving autosave on often slowed down Word to an unworkable pace and after a few other issues (I'm not exactly sure what, wasn't involved) we just made sure only one person at a time works on the document. Some other annoying small issues I experienced: when working together sometimes your undo history is gone. I guess that's because someone else edited too and correctly undoing something someone else edited in between is not simple. IMO it's impossible and any system doing merges automatically will fall apart at some point. Track edits cannot track deleting rows of a table Wed based word works actually pretty fine, but it misses random features. Adding captions seems not to be supported.

yarky 5y ago
I agree, I also expected the whole office365 ecosystem to do what's supposed to, but I also found it useless due to the slowness and errors the whole team kept getting while working on the same file. That and the fact that it somehow feels like the Mac version of their products always comes with a bonus bug. Don't event get me started on their web versions. It's the little things...
D13Fd 5y ago
Were you using it on Linux or something? Or maybe with very large documents? I use it every day and really haven’t had slowness issues, even when running via Parallels on the Mac side. Of course, typically my docs are <100 pages and light on images. I have seen undo history go away when edits collide with multiple users, but that’s really the only way it could work. And you can still view old versions of the doc if you need to retrieve/restore something. MS Word as a whole is definitely very far from flawless, but it’s still better than the alternatives I’ve seen, and it’s extremely entrenched. That’s why it’s hard to see “git for office docs”succeeding.
- CorrectHorseBat 5y ago
  >Were you using it on Linux or something? Or maybe with very large documents ~250 pages, ~100 images, not something I expect a modern computer to struggle with. We used the web version on Linux sometimes, but I think it also happened when we didn't. >I have seen undo history go away when edits collide with multiple users, but that’s really the only way it could work. And you can still view old versions of the doc if you need to retrieve/restore something. The other way is like git does it, manual merging and conflict resolving. I don't think there's a way around that once you work with enough people together on a file.
  - D13Fd 5y ago
    That makes sense, although obviously the downside to a manual check-in/merge process is that it greatly slows down the editing flow. Personally for the kinds of documents I work on, I'd rather risk losing my undo history than have to deal with manually merging changes from multiple users. Plus, without real-time concurrent editing, the changes are much more likely to conflict.

jsmith99 5y ago

Word also includes a nice GUI diffing tool for docx files. It's possible to make git diff use it using something like https://github.com/ForNeVeR/ExtDiff https://github.com/ForNeVeR/ExtDiff

thrwawy283 5y ago
Thank you for sharing this. I had no idea it existed! I was getting pandoc cleared at my work, but for the Windows environment that it is, this is another solution :)

thrwawy283 5y ago

Hmm. Sometimes I step back and I look at the version history in modern Office documents and it does feel convenient. I like the CRDT editing a lot. It still feels too loose and prone to issues, but I recognize its value to the average person. Most of what bothers me is trying to view, read-only a previous version. Usually I have several Word or Excel documents up on my screen, and it's easy to begin modifying a past version that then becomes the latest. It's not reflex to open a previous version and untoggle autosave. It bites me all the time.. In Office's pursuit to help people avoid losing data, I wind up overwriting what I need to preserve. A lot.. I have not seen manual version names in Word doc history. Maybe I'm sheltered :s

srazzaque 5y ago

It's great, until it isnt. For small and simple documents (sub 20 pages), there's no better option. In my experience it starts to creak on large documents with multiple editors. I did a project many years ago where the key deliverable was a large report, worked upon by 3-4 contributors over 12 weeks. That last week was absolute madness. Document got corrupted, and we tried all sorts of things. We ended up importing the corrupt document into Google Docs, which, oddly enough, did a better job of working with a corrupt Word document than MS Word did.

jmmcd 5y ago
I've seen online Word become extremely slow even for small documents with a few editors. It doesn't help that there are lots of versions of online Word - there's the one that lives in Sharepoint, the one I get to via Outlook, the one in Teams, and (maybe? somehow?) the desktop Word when editing an online file.

bodge5000 5y ago

I dont use word, but I do know people that do use it (the modern version) and they still have files called "...final 3 copy(4) really final.docx". These features are nice and all, but the thing is, most users not only don't care about using them, but don't care about even the idea of them to know they exist, so they continue with the old workflow. Most of the time its better to get out of the users way, but in cases like this, if you truly do want to get rid of the infinite finals, they need a bit of a nudge

wildzzz 5y ago

We use SharePoint for revisions for casual documents and another CM system for tracking releases of official documents. The CM system is meant really for CAD models but it lets you upload Word docs that it displays as PDFs with watermarked revision information so you have to have a revision table at the front of the document for listing changes. The SharePoint system is a lot easier to use but you don't get the same sort of change approval system since anyone can edit. Instead we use multiple folders for WIP, waiting for QA approval, and final versions. We have to follow ISO 9001 but anything developmental or that is just derivate of documents in the CM system can live on much more casual systems like git, SVN, or SharePoint.

zouhair 5y ago

It's a proprietary format, it's not gonna last. Microsoft word can't even open files from old version of the same software. None of these word document will be readable in 50 years from now, a text file though.

catach 5y ago
A modern MS Word document is pretty much zipped XML and mostly ISO standard-compliant.