<story><title>Git for the masses</title><url>http://kivo.com/blog/git-for-the-masses/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>jonchang</author><text>Office already has features to track and merge different copies of documents together. Assuming you haven&amp;#x27;t disabled it, it also has (hidden) builtin versioning, allowing a git-like three-way merge with all the accuracy improvements that entails.&lt;p&gt;The larger problem is, of course, discovering that these features exist and training people to use them.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>discodave</author><text>One problem with the office track changes feature is that ALL PREVIOUS VERSIONS OF THE DOCUMENT ARE INSIDE THE DOCUMENT.&lt;p&gt;This is wrong, the document should be inside the VCS.&lt;p&gt;Some examples that my mother brought up regarding Law firms and the track changes feature are that if somebody writes &amp;#x27;adding this paragraph because of idiot customer X&amp;#x27; 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...&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;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.</text></comment>
<story><title>Git for the masses</title><url>http://kivo.com/blog/git-for-the-masses/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>jonchang</author><text>Office already has features to track and merge different copies of documents together. Assuming you haven&amp;#x27;t disabled it, it also has (hidden) builtin versioning, allowing a git-like three-way merge with all the accuracy improvements that entails.&lt;p&gt;The larger problem is, of course, discovering that these features exist and training people to use them.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jervisfm</author><text>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.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;[1] - &lt;a href=&quot;http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word-help/what-happened-to-versioning-HA010219332.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;office.microsoft.com&amp;#x2F;en-us&amp;#x2F;word-help&amp;#x2F;what-happened-to...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>