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A better alternative to using Git for Microsoft Word documents
GIT is a great tool for collaborating on code, but it isn’t built for Word. Fortunately there is a tool that takes the principles of GIT and puts them in a nice UI that directly integrates with Word.
Are you wanting to use GIT for Microsoft Word?
Maybe you need to do proper version control on your documents so that people stop emailing around different versions of Word documents with crazy filenames like ‘Contract_v27_DAVE_EDITS’, or perhaps you need to be able see the differences between each version to understand how a document changed, who changed and when.
GIT is a great tool for collaborating on code, but it isn’t built for Word. It requires you to use separate tools to convert from docx into plain text to do diffs, it can’t merge versions together, and it’s unlikely you’ll be able to use it to collaborate with someone who doesn’t know GIT.
Fortunately there is a tool that takes the principles of GIT (automated versioning, diffing, merging, branches, forking, etc) and puts them in a nice UI that directly integrates with Word.
Read on to learn more about Simul Docs.
A Git-like tool for Word documents
Simul Docs is a version control and collaboration tool for Microsoft Word documents. It takes the principles of GIT (versioning, diffing, merge, etc) and makes them available to help collaborate on Word documents.
It was founded by a software engineer who saw his colleagues at a major bank collaborating on documents by emailing them around and using crazy filenames like ‘Contact_v27_DAVE_EDITS’ for version control and realised that the way version control is done with tools like Git would be useful for Microsoft Word documents.
However, he knew that in order for the product to be successful it had to have a clean, simple user interface that people who didn’t understand Git could also use.
Simul has many of the features of GIT that you’d need to collaborate on Word documents, including:
- Direct integration with Word - Simply click the ‘Open in Word’ button and the document will open in Word or Word Online ready for editing. No need to convert between plain text and docx each time.
- Automated versioning - Each time someone opens the document and makes changes, Simul automatically creates a new version.
- Diffing - Simul has it’s own comparison engine that shows you what changed in each version of the document.
- Branching - When two people work on the document at the same time, Simul will automatically save each person’s changes in a separate branch so that nobody’s work is overwritten.
- Merging - When two conflicting versions of a document exist, Simul’s automated merge tool can bring them back together in 1 click and highlight’s each person’s changes using Word’s default Track Changes feature, allowing you to easily identify and approve/reject changes on a line by line basis.
- Forking - Create a fork of a document to allow someone to make changes to the document in an isolated environment.
- Pull - Submit a forked document for merging back to the master, and the document owner can accept or reject the proposed changes.
- Revert - Easily revert to a previous version of the document, or take content from a previous version to add to the latest.
How a GIT-like tool can help people collaborate on Word documents
A tool like Simul, that brings the features of GIT to Microsoft Word, can help make it easier for multiple people to collaborate on Word documents.
To get started, all you need to do is upload the document to Simul and invite people in to collaborate on it.
Once they've accepted the invite to collaborate on a document, all someone has to do to work on it is click the ‘Open In Word’ button and the selected version will automatically open in Microsoft Word.
Once they’ve finished making their changes, they simply close and save the document and Simul will automatically create a new version and show you what they changed.
If you need to collaborate with someone outside of Simul (like a client or opposing counsel), you can simply download a version and email it off to them.
Then once they’ve made their changes and sent the document back to you, you can upload it as a new version and Simul will show you exactly what they changed (even if Track Changes wasn’t turned on or if certain changes were somehow ‘missed’ by track changes).
Once you’ve gone back and forth with others collaborating on the document, you can finalise it by requesting approval from all members, which acts as a signoff feature to get everyone’s approval that this version is the final version of the document.
As you can see from the above example, Simul has taken the core principles of GIT and wrapped a friendly user interface around it that allows anyone (regardless of whether they have experience with GIT or not) to collaborate on and version control Word documents.
Benefits of using Simul over directly using GIT
Trying to use GIT with Word means that each time you want to work on a document you need to download it from GIT, convert it back to DOCX, make changes to it, convert it from DOCX to plain text and then upload it again as a new version.
This is a complicated process and on long times with multiple collaborators would need to be done hundreds of times, which can waste hours of precious writing time.
Simul on the other hand has a direct integration with Microsoft Word that means all you need to do to work on the a document is click the ‘Open In Word’ button and it will automatically open in Word.
Easier versioning
Trying to use GIT with Word means that each time you want to work on a document you need to download it from GIT, convert it back to DOCX, make changes to it, convert it from DOCX to plain text and then upload it again as a new version.
This is a complicated process and on long times with multiple collaborators would need to be done hundreds of times, which can waste hours of precious writing time.
Simul on the other hand has a direct integration with Microsoft Word that means all you need to do to work on the a document is click the ‘Open In Word’ button and it will automatically open in Word.
Easier comparisons
Simul has a built-in comparison algorithm that runs each time a new version is created and shows you exactly what changes were made in that version.
The algorithm can compare not only text, but images, graphs, tables and more.
No need to convert file formats back and forth from Docx to plain text and relying on Track Changes.
Easier collaboration
Simul has a friendly UI that even non-technical users find easy to use. In fact, Simul has over 10,000 users in 65 countries and the vast majority do not have any experience with GIT or coding at all.
This makes it easy to collaborate not only with other developers who are familiar with GIT, but with other stakeholders who have never even heard of it before.
Wrap Up
GIT provides great functionality for collaborating on and version controlling code, but it simply wasn’t built for Word documents and the process of trying to integrate GIT with Microsoft Word is extremely inefficient.
Using Simul however brings all the key features and functionality you are looking for in GIT to Microsoft Word documents, but does it in a user friendly way that anyone can access.
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