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Comment by mathnode | Hacker News Reader

Desktop application software for collaborative editing? No way.

Confluence? Twiki? Or equal such centralised documentaiotn and revision service, be it SaaS or locally hosted, Yes.

As someone observing and partaking in the process of migrating a large svn repository of word documents into confluence I can tell you that confluence's markup and review functionality (even with add-ons) is a very poor substitute for word. It's still beneficial to do it for the ease of access and the improved searchability and document linking abilities, but it's definitely a trade-off where you lose while you gain.

Wait. What? Have you tried collaboration with a Word before saying this? I make my living collaborating on documents in Word. Which part of it did you have a problem with? I have found only OneNote to be any better than Word but alas it lacks a bunch of Word features.

Of course he hasn't, none of the people here claiming that 'emacs + git is better than Word' or 'LibreOffice does all 90% of people use' have. If actual users had only 10% of the problems with Word that are being described in this thread, they would have flocked to other products years ago. Fact is, they didn't, and it's because Word works well enough for the vast majority of them. Of course, they all bitch every now and then, but then again so do they (and I, this is not a 'stupid users' rant) about anything.

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