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Comment by xhrpost | Hacker News Reader

I use MS Office occasionally at work but even that small amount of usage has me wanting to use Google Docs instead. -Someone has the Excel file open on the network? Oh, read-only for you my friend. Have to save? Better track down whoever has it open. -No revision/change tracking. Have to always be alert as to who is changing what and when. Often simpler just to make a new file and add to the clutter on the network folder.

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Here is one thing about Excel that drive me crazy - you can't have 2 files with the same name open at once. Why? Because of a "calculation ambiguity".

Actually this is a hang back from the COM interface. There is a Name property which is used to uniquely identify the document.

To be fair, I don't think I've ever had a problem with this unless I was being thrown Sheets/Docs via email which is a really bad thing to do to start with. Email is not a suitable document archival system!

Right tool for the job, or it's: http://wyorock.com/excelasadatabase.htm

The lack of change tracking just blows me away. It's a killer feature for Docs.

Have you actually used office? It has change tracking, diff and merge and has done for over 10 years. The problem here is network locking which is totally different.

You can TURN ON change tracking (more on that in a moment) in Office applications. It doesn't exist on the web interface of Skydrive at all.

The change tracking in office is nothing at all like the "See Revision History" in Google Docs. The Google Docs one is miles better.

Yes if you want it you can. Then again you can also enforce change tracking by policy.

Regarding SkyDrive, you're talking rubbish. It's been there for literally years.

Right click a document in skydrive and select "Version history". You can review every version, restore earlier versions and open the changes up in Word if you have it installed and review there.

If you go "big" and use O365 you can review and accept, annotate all changes and commit to sharepoint for example from your desktop app.

You can even wire it into review workflows so that commits are staged and reviewed by an editor, people are notified etc. This is great for legal documents, contracts etc.

Google Docs doesn't get a look in.

Ah, foolish me, I thought I could find a revision history from within a document.

It takes about 5 seconds to change which revision I'm looking at, in a 30-line document. And it doesn't actually show me which lines changed.

This is still useless.

Fair enough - they should probably add this.

I'm not getting a 5 second delay here. It's instant (~0.5 seconds).

You're right about the changes not being marked up, although it does do this on Office 365 so perhaps it's a market segregation thing.

...and can I seriously not search the contents of documents from SkyDrive?

Never tried. Don't need that feature myself.

You're doing it wrong.

sharepoint/svn avoids these issues.

Isn't that just another point in his favor? It's easy to say "you're doing it wrong, just learn how to use these other technologies so Office works correctly", but most users would obviously prefer a product where "doing it right" is the default behavior. I'm speaking of course only with respect to the feature being discussed here (collaborative editing); I don't have much of an opinion on Office vs Drive overall.

Exactly, not everyone using these files are coders or computer savvy enough to tolerate SVN or GIT.

We have many non technical users doing just fine with TortoiseSVN on windows...

If it's a command line app they'd be lost so that might be the basis of your argument.

So you have users editing Office documents and committing changes to SVN and you don't get conflicts? Or if you do, they are able to resolve them?

Yes you do get and can resolve the conflicts.

Despite common knowledge you can diff and merge office documents with TortoiseSVN. All it does is fire up their built in review/diff tools.

For normal office workers, this contraption really works better than collaboration (and change tracking if you need it) via Google Docs? Wow.

Not really. It's a known problem since the dawn of computing: How do you control multiple users accessing a binary file cleanly over the network?

The solutions that are generally accepted as the right solutions are:

1. Version control systems. So in this case, SVN or Sharepoint (yes it is a version control system for documents).

2. Collaborative editing.

3. Synchronisation.

In favour of point 1 which I always suggest using, history is possible to tie to a user always, centrally controlled, archivable on your own site, actually really easy to manage and allows people to work entirely offline. It scales to mega-sized documents as well. Imagine our typical formal specs (sorry we're too finicky about quality to do agile) which are 200-280 pages long in Google Docs?

Point 2 can lead to odd corruption. If you've ever actually done any collaborative editing with 2 or more people on Google docs or dealt with the crock of shit that is Numbers or Pages and iCloud on the Mac you'll know where I'm coming from.

Point 3 is just the transport layer for 2 and 1. OneNote does this, very well.

So the point is moot. Just because it complains at you that you're doing it wrong, doesn't mean the technical solution doesn't require some work on your part.

"sharepoint/svn avoids these issues"?

Utter fail.

It's like you're telling me to send a TELEGRAM rather than use IRC.

Care to expand on this rather than draw a baseless analogy?

Have you used Google Docs collaboratively with another person? While I type, I see what you're typing.

If you instead use Excel files stored on the network, and you and I want to "collaborate" on a document, at best we're ping-ponging the file back and forth to each other. Sometimes we collide, and have to Merge - which is very painful if we've made any kind of extensive changes.

Suggesting Sharepoint / SVN is a reasonable solution to how to collaborate is like suggesting one telegraph system over another. It's not remotely the same thing, at all.

Office 365 is much better, granted. But the SkyDrive interface is no better (and in many ways worse) than Google Docs.

Yeah I have actually. It's horrible and really unreliable when document sizes get realistic (40+ pages). Not only that it's so easy to fuck up the document structure badly.

I wouldn't use Excel files on a network. I'd use a database or chuck the xlsx into SVN. Changes to complex data need to be managed. Don't expect miracles. There are edge cases where Google Docs will get this wrong. Sync needs human decisions made occasionally.

See my other comments about usage of SVN/Sharepoint and the use cases.

Office 365 is sharepoint. Skydrive is actually a variety of sharepoint. The interface isn't great but neither is google docs, which is why larger companies tend to just use Sharepoint Workspace which is a desktop app for accessing sharepoint portals.

I've never seen any of the unreliability you're talking about, and I've very rarely had a document structure get messed up.

It's like you're reviewing a completely different product from the one I've used daily, for years.

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