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Comment by mtgx | Hacker News Reader

So Google Docs? It seems close enough. What's the main advantage over Google Docs?

The addition of tags/versions is something that I would kill for in Google Docs. It would make life so much easier in my current role if we had the ability to tag a version so that you can easily see a diff between that specific, tagged version and the current version (rather than just seeing diffs over time as it is currently implemented).

There's an add-on you can get in whatever marketplace they have. But I hate using those because it's not clear to me what these third parties can or can't see. I found it when I realized that despite Google storing extensive change history they hardly do anything with it.

I feel like I've searched pretty extensively but not found such an add-on. If you can remember the name and link it here that would be awesome.

Exactly this. Right now, Google Docs marries the worst aspects of version control (long, weird, unstructured, incoherent change history) and the worst of no version control at all (the need to keep creating final.v2.edited.JS_changes copies as a multi-author document evolves).

I'm fairly convinced that Google doesn't really give a shit about their apps suite. The apps have barely changed in years.

Word is tons more powerful than Google Docs, has add-ins, way more formatting and styling. In my mind, Google Doc is not a direct competitor to Word when it comes to professional editing and writing.

Ideally, styling should have nothing to do with editing or writing. You're talking about print (or PDF/static image) publishing, I guess?

Ideally, yes. But so many people only know of Word, or have been writing using Word for so long that they won't change their workflow and they simply do what works for them.

...in the real world, they're one and the same.

Professional firms that produce contracts and reports generally have document format guidelines and standard templates. They may also have approved typefaces, up to and including brand-custom typefaces. And while these things could be applied by document editors or tools later based on a simple set of text documents (I'd be in favor of that), in reality everyone works in Word, and the working Word documents are what will eventually become signed legal documents or stamped and sealed engineering studies, or similar. Styling does matter.

I guarantee you anyone considering paying for a Word tie-in does not need to be convinced to use Word over Google Docs.

From the article

  There is a lot of overlap here with the authoring process of a Word document. You don’t necessarily want the real-time coauthoring experience offered by Microsoft SharePoint or Google Docs., this can inhibit your ability to determine who is responsible for specific changes to content. Branching offers a much clearer audit trail of changes. Like with code, tags can be added to signify a minor or major version of a document is ready to be published.

While it's very cool, I'm shivering at the idea of teaching Git to non-technical people. And it still seems like a non-realtime version of Google Docs because Gdocs does offer audits

I've never used this, but I intend on checking it out. Just from the website, it seems it brings all the benefits of git like branching, merging, etc whereas Google docs revision history is strictly linear.

Too many more features, fonts, style, customization etc....plus lots if companies already use it for everything, may not want to swtich to google.

Google Docs is only online, I have to give my documents to Google and is quite thin in product features.

Can't use Google Docs offline for one

https://support.google.com/docs/answer/6388102?co=GENIE.Plat...

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...

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