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Comment by jonchang | Hacker News Reader

Office already has features to track and merge different copies of documents together. Assuming you haven't disabled it, it also has (hidden) builtin versioning, allowing a git-like three-way merge with all the accuracy improvements that entails.

The larger problem is, of course, discovering that these features exist and training people to use them.

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One problem with the office track changes feature is that ALL PREVIOUS VERSIONS OF THE DOCUMENT ARE INSIDE THE DOCUMENT.

This is wrong, the document should be inside the VCS.

Some examples that my mother brought up regarding Law firms and the track changes feature are that if somebody writes 'adding this paragraph because of idiot customer X' or repurposes a document for customer Y into a document for customer X then some bright beaver at customer X turns on the track changes feature...

I'm sure there is a way to scrub the changes from the document before sending it but not separating the content from the history will always create problems.

Tracked changes show up in bright red, blue, and green colors. Difficult to miss, as long as you don't hide them. There are also ways to ensure that a "final" revision of a document is saved.

The hidden versioning I talked about are attributes on elements in the XML version of documents that are not normally displayed. They contain a random number that distinguish text edited in different "blocks" from each other -- making it possible to determine how to combine different versions of text, without containing full version history (and thus leaking information like in your example). It's not as good as a recursive three-way merge that git has, but it's reasonably effective when combining documents.

You are right that it doesn't separate the content from the history -- but keeping full history and keeping things private are at odds with each other anyway. Consider the outrage when people rediscovered the Fast Save feature -- it was very useful, but it also leaked potentially sensitive information in a way people didn't expect.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/197978

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9780073-7.html

Office used to have a rather handy (well-hidden) builtin versioning feature whereby new saves were not permanent. Instead only what changed was saved in a delta-fashion and so one could go back and access the different versions of a file (from different times) all in the same file.

This feature was good for the case of a solo author who working on a draft document and needing to keep various versions of the documents in one file (as opposed to having multiple versions with potentially funny names depending on the naming-scheme in use). Unfortunately, MS removed this feature way back when Office 2007[1] was released. OS-level file versioning functionality that exists can help fill the void though.

[1] - http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word-help/what-happened-to...

Yeah, "Track Changes" and that feature that lets people put initialed notes in the margins of Word docs are pretty widely used among Word power users (it's how my wife and her supervisor are editing her thesis - my supervisor and I used a git-versioned LaTeX document with a custom macro for notes, but that's the difference between a humanities and a CS degree :-) )

I've been effective with Markdown and pandoc backed by git or Dropbox for my own work, but with shared documents it's always Word with track changes. I think part of the problem is that everyone you're working with needs to be comfortable with the editing tools you use, and with more people Word quickly becomes the lowest common denominator for collaboration.

> Office already has features to track and merge different copies of documents together

Only for MS Word I'm afraid.. :( (unless you want to buy a sharepoint deployment for the other products, and that versioning stuff is REALLY clunky!)

Excel has track changes, and Powerpoint can merge two different versions of a slideshow together. Word can do both, of course.

Yes, it's slightly clunky, but quite effective as long as you know how to use it: for example, you usually want to minimize unnecessary changes to formatting to make it easier to see differences, just like how you're not supposed to mix whitespace and code changes in a patch.

We're trying to make performing these actions simpler than they currently are. Would love any feedback or ideas.

I don't think those diffs are centrally managed though, which is a big problem.

An often ignored aspect of version control is that commit access is strictly defined and enforced by the software. This is difficult when you have multiple versions of documents with formatting problems emailed around.

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