7 ms·
> Their eyes lit up at the prospect of a way out of that. That was in 2001. Why don't we have that yet? The companies making word processors make word processo
by adekok 12y ago
> Their eyes lit up at the prospect of a way out of that. That was in 2001. Why don't we have that yet?
The companies making word processors make word processors. They don't make revision control systems. They don't make document management systems.
It's a failure of vision. Their vision is narrow, and doesn't match their customers work-flow.
Sure, Word has "track changes", but it doesn't have "merge two documents". Because that problem is hard, and the word processor people have no idea how to solve it.
The revision control people look at diff'ing binary files, and go "bleah, use text". So revision control systems don't work for binary blobs like Word files.
And never the twain shall meet.
- jschwartzi 12y agoActually, Word does have Merge Two Documents: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/306484 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/306484 If you could extract the changeset from that then you would be well on your way to supporting version control in Word. One problem I've seen is that people tend to conflate version control and document control, and so they end up using version control systems to prevent revisions to documents, rather than to collate revisions to documents into a history.
- jameshart 12y agoBut Word does have the ability to merge two documents. And you can even configure VCS clients like TortoiseSVN to launch Word as the merge tool for .docx files.
- dragonwriter 12y agoActually, Word had had compare and merge functionality for documents for some time -- at least Word 2002/2003, maybe earlier. Also, word docs default format since 2007 are OOXML, so text -- though not necessarily line -- oriented diffing and merging should be possible.