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Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

Use sharepoint, office365, and Teams. It versions, it supports collaborative editing, no more mailing things around, and so on.

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Sounds like many commenters here haven't used Office 365 and may have outdated ideas of what Office is capable of these days (it ain't Office 2010).

Of course one can't do a pull request with Office (non-geeks would struggle with the idea anyway) but live-editing of shared documents and version history is now built-in.

If two or more people open the same .docx/.pptx/.xlsx from a shared environment (Sharepoint/Teams/OneDrive), and then proceed click on Open in Desktop App (the browser-based apps are unpolished IMO), AutoSave is automatically turned on, and they're automatically thrown into live collaboration mode. This is the new norm in most enterprises that have Office365.

Most office folks require version history rather than version control -- not many are likely to need to branch, merge, pull, push -- and Office365 definitely supports the former. You can even have a threaded conversation about the changes in the document itself. -- when you add a comment, the chat sidebar opens. The back-and-forth comments are stored in the document.

Note: this is different from "Track Changes" in older version of office -- which still exists but is more for visual diffing. Version history only stores snapshots.

You can actually do a sort-of pull request: suggested changes. When editing mode of the document is set to "reviewing" then your changes would appear as sidebar suggestions which the owner can accept or reject.

Yup. This is how I (a developer) often interact with lawyers at work.

Yep! I think Microsoft lulled people into a false sense that they weren't doing anything with Office, while the Google suite gradually gained features (and to be fair, does 90% of what a normal person would ever do with documents). But it turned out they were busy making every feature in Office work in the collaborative environment, with versioning. It's incredibly impressive, and I am not a natural fan of Microsoft. It doesn't work as well as Google with a crappy or nonexistent Internet connection, but in your typical office environment it's great. I think people will be really surprised at how easily you can do things like assemble slides for a collaborative presentation. Sharing with people outside the organization requires a Microsoft account of some kind (either institutional or your old Xbox Live or Minecraft account) but that's about it. A high fraction of everything can be done in the browser, so it's easier than ever to have a Linux desktop. Plus have you see they have LateX equations now?

Yep, this is why as a pragmatist, I'm all about "reviewing my priors" from time to time. Things change, constraints change, and we need to constantly update our views.

I lived through the days of Microsoft being predatory and evil and I hated Microsoft because their products sucked (not sure if anyone remembers the strident rhetoric in comp.os.os2.advocacy -- that newsgroup raised Microsoft hatred into an art form). For years this emotional response blinded me to the pockets of genuinely good technology that Microsoft had in its lineup (like SQL Server).

When I started working in an enterprise environment, I often ended doing things the hard way because of this blind spot of resisting anything Microsoft. It cost me so much.

It was only when I was forced to put aside my prejudices that I discovered that it was actually possible to be productive while using Microsoft tech. Nowadays I favor pragmatism and productivity over partisanship, and try to choose the best tool for the job, and if it means choosing MS tools occasionally, that's ok.

Syncdocs https://www.syncdocs.com/ is a tool that lets multiple Microsoft Office and Google Docs users collaborate in real-time on the same document. It uses Google Docs for versioning.

The above is true, but there are caveats. Under the hood, Office is constantly saving back to Sharepoint and trying to merge changes. If it can't merge changes it will simply alert the user and give the option of abandoning their changes or saving them locally for manual merge later.

In my experience, merging seems to fail more often with Excel and PowerPoint than Word, but even in Word applying doc-wide changes (e.g. change of language) while someone else edits usually fails.

For sequential editing it works fine and keeps an automatic version history.

That’s interesting——I regularly collaborate with 30+ users and have yet to see a merge conflict.

Is it possible you’re using a older version of Sharepoint that isn’t collaboration aware? I know in older versions of Sharepoint, documents get checked out and locked all the time. Are you able to do live editing? If you aren’t, we might talking about different versions here.

With Office 365 and Sharepoint 2016, I was under the impression that collaboration uses operational transformations (like Google Docs) or CRDTs rather than continuous merging —- which isn’t feasible for real-time live editing anyway. Unresolvable conflicts are rare because the merge is happening at the action level, not document level.

The experience in Office 365 has been similar to Google Suite for me.

Using Office 365 SharePoint and the latest versions of the native apps.

Fascinating. Not sure why then. But then again doc wide changes are rare for me and my team so maybe that’s the difference.

This is the correct answer, both Office 365 and SharePoint natively version documents. It is the closest built-in thing you will get to Git for Office

Agreed.

The only caveat I'd offer is, for MS Word specifically, you can have: (1) Large complex documents (i.e. lots of links/references, sections) OR (2) Many collaborators. Pick ONE. If you must have both of these, leave track changes off, and use highlights and comments.

I've been in the unfortunate position of being next to a deadline, where the word document was the key deliverable. And then having that document become corrupted. Fairly certain it was a confluence of the above factors that caused it. If the doc is starting to take 30 seconds or more to just scroll down or edit one character, that's your first warning bell.

We tried opening in Word Online, Word Mac, Word Windows and even LibreOffice. No dice. What worked in the end? A smart chap on our team thought to try importing the doc into Google Docs, and then exporting it again...

From my perspective, Office 365 today has an identical experience to GSuite with respect to collaboration.

We regularly edit complex documents with large numbers of collaborators. Track changes and collaboration are different though (the former has been around since time immemorial but collaboration only came out a couple of years ago)

Office365 can be a tad frustrating since the web version and desktop version support different feature sets. It's not that one is better than the other, it's that some features exist in one version that don't exist in the other (mostly collaboration features). Throw in the Mac version of Office and you have yet another subset of features that isn't supported.

I get that they're headed towards WebKit for all their apps, but it's kind of frustrating to have to head to outlook.com for some things and have to use the desktop version for others (though the search via outlook.com is vastly improved over the desktop versions of Outlook).

With sharepoint and onedrive I struggled to coordinate when someone edits/commits. With git you do the change and PR. Office has no concept of someone merging changes.

My $0.02: just use git?

> just use git?

Sounds good in theory - now imagine explaining to a group of regular office workers concept of commits, merges, pull requests, whole workflow and additional software for doing all of this. It's just not possible.

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