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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 ove

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.

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.