Show HN: Version Control for Microsoft Word (opens in new tab)

Congratulations on your launch!

Other folks have provided a bunch of commentary on the validity of your idea, so I won't address that.

BUT: if this is a good idea, your pricing is far too low for a niche product like this. $10 (or 10 quid) is too low a monthly fee for pretty much any product marketed as a business product. 10 per seat per month is probably also too low, but would be a better starting point.

Likely objection: "But Spotify is only $10/mo!!!" Spotify has the much larger addressable market of people with hearing and an Internet connection. Even Dropbox has a higher price point for business users, and it also has a far larger addressable market.

If you're building something that's useful for people, charge more.

Good luck!

Many others have said it already, but I'll say it again:

1. You have a fantastic product

2. Many potential users won't accept to have their documents stored "in the cloud" (even though those same users share those same documents by email with zero security, all the time)

3. Offer a stand alone version and sell a licence (or a rent, think the former Google Search Appliance)

4. Charge an arm and a leg for it -- think Oracle pricing

5. Get rich!

If you had a version that companies could install on a private internal network, you could easily charge between $100 and $1000 a month for this.

I work in legal and compliance technology, and it is very important to keep documents secured internally if the have confidential information.

Cool!

Here's my unsolicited opinion: you preemptively answer "why wouldn't I just use git?" but I think "why is this better than track changes?" is the question prospective users are more likely to have. Comparisons to SharePoint versioning might also be helpful.

This fills a niche I need but I can't use a service where I upload the documents to your server (unless you can show certification of at least ISO 27001). I would also be willing to pay more for it. Version controlling Word documents is a need for anyone doing a lot of QC. You have a superb product to sell.

Slight aside (since LibreOffice != Word, and XML diffs are still horribly messy):

If you save your LibreOffice documents in flat XML format, (e.g. fods, fodt instead of ods, odt), placing them under version control becomes slightly less annoying — the diffs become at least _potentially_ human readable.

See also:

http://blog.riemann.cc/2013/04/23/versioning-of-openoffice-l...

https://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/msg48067.h...

This is interesting, but what's wrong with "Track Changes"? (a feature Word had for at least 10+ years now). I believe for most people that is more than enough for version control purposes. For tech people that actually know what Git is and how to use it, I bet they'd want real Git integration, or they'd choose to store the document in a different (more easily managed by Git) format such as .md or .html.

This is very cool, and I wish we had something like this, but I don't see many law firms going for it.

Most law firms (and I would guess all major ones) will not allow uploading of client documents or work-product to any cloud provider, let alone an unproven start up. This risk is frankly way too high.

The only way I see this happening in the legal context is if it can be run from the firm's servers with all data hosted locally.

If all you need is to diff documents (Word, Excel, PPT, or arbitrary PDFs) then I can't recommend https://draftable.com/compare enough. It's an amazing tool. Granted, you need to do merges manually with just a diff tool, but that's not usually the bottleneck.

I tried doing something like this a couple of years ago by embedding an actual git repository inside a docx or ODF file. Unfortunately, most popular word processing suites back then trashed the git directory instead of leaving it alone (as they should, according to the standards)

let me guess:

- unzip the .docx file into xml files

- parse the xml into something organizable by line (csv? etc)

- commit this other file format

- in the GUI of your app, when someone selects a snapshot in time, go from the by line (csv? etc) format back to .docx

- open in word

- profit

(way back when we did this with excel, but ultimately gave up https://github.com/decisive-wizard/GridHub)

Took me a while of reading here to realise, there's no git here. This is a seperate thing that cannot be integrated with your existing stuff, if you're already using Git.

I'd like to have the option of Word documents in Git but I don't want a whole other system just for the special snowflake that is Word as I'm already using Git for managing LaTeX documents and doing that entirely on my own infra.

How big do you think the intersection is of people who can use git and people who want to use Microsoft Word?

I've used git for word docs for years now. Using pandoc to convert them to markdown allows sensible diffs to be displayed as well. Works great for redlining.

This is actually a great idea, but not a new one. See this TED talk from 2012 [1]. I hope this kind of thing is integrated into more products and services

[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_the_internet_will_...

Firstly, great job in getting that mess to play well with Git!

    The main limitation with Git is that it only works with
    plain text (think Windows Notepad). I have seen authors
    resort to plain text or markdown in order to take
    advantage of Git, but this means losing all of your rich
    formatting such as images and fonts. This is usually too
    much of a sacrifice for companies as formatting needs to
    be reapplied with each publication, which is very
    time-consuming and prone to errors.

"but this means losing all of your rich formatting such as images"

For plain text, sure, for markdown, nope.

"...and fonts"

Sure, but formatting can be applied after. With markdown, it supports HTML so you could event apply custom formatting inline, if you really wanted to do something so dirty.

"This is usually too much of a sacrifice for companies as formatting needs to be reapplied with each publication, which is very time-consuming and prone to errors."

Why not solve this problem? Why not make markdown more accessible to those wanting to use Word? Make something that looks like word, but in reality takes markdown and renders it using some flexible settings file?

I personally quite like markdown, to me it represents a minimal, future proof language. I would actually change a few things about markdown to make it more useful in an academic setting. Issues for me are referencing structure, diagrams, embedding content (at the position) and plots. Those things fixed, I would never look back at LaTeX or Word again.

One thing I would like to see remain, is the plain-text readability and being able to process it line-by-line without having to remember anything about the previous line.

Good luck with this venture, but if you're wanting to take a pivot, let me know :)

Finally someone is doing this! I've been toying with the idea myself but haven't been able to dedicate time to it, mostly I was deterred by the MS Word format mess. I'm sure it wasn't fun making this work with a 21st century versioning system.

I'm sure lots of people will happily throw money at you for this!

Decades ago I had started a company to do this, for all but executable files (that was for later) and finished a working prototype that was very fast, no known issues. The prototype was limited re file size because of extended/expanded memory issues with that Borland compiler, but the new compiler to solve that had already been published. Then Microsoft announced they were bringing out a similar product. My backer pulled out immediately thereafter, and that was the end of my company. But the Microsoft product never came out, after all... good old FUD.

Most of the damage done by not enforcing anti-monoploy laws is entirely invisible, the dogs that don't ever get a chance to bark.

I think if you can get people to use this and try it, you're going to make a ton of cash. This has been needed for years and doing it within Word sounds to me like the absolute best solution. Get in touch if I can help at all or you're raising!

Hey OP, this looks like an awesome tool, good job! Just a quick question, would the primary alternative to your product be Microsoft Sharepoint? If so, how would you market your service as better?

THIS is how Sharepoint should have worked from day 1. But I guess Microsoft thinks normal office workers won't get version history in their mind.

To me, one of the biggest problems with weird file formats is that every single problem has to be solved again, just for that. Not only that but once a solution has been created, it is probably the only option (instead of one of a dozen) because it is so much harder to do the combination of both $DESIRED_FEATURE and $PARSE_FILE, not to mention $DEBUG_QUIRKS.

I worked for a company that did studies to get FDA approval for a medical device. The company was very professional and well managed. But THIS is what they were lacking. I always thought they need something like github and Version control for the constantly changing documents.

Nice to see this happening! I wrote about "Git for everyone" in Idea Dump 6 in 2012.

http://willgrant.org/post/idea-dump-6/

I think this is a good product, once worked in strategy as an intern at a bank and we basically used manual versioning where we would version using date and time or even content, this is definitely a step up

What's wrong with using a document management system instead of this?

This is a great addition for such a used tool as Microsoft Word is. It could also help to stablish a better mindset of what version control means for non techie people. Congratus on the release!

Is there any way to delete documents? I uploaded a trash document just to try it out, but now I can never delete it - only "archive it" which is bugging the OCD side of me

Good idea in general, but with one major flaw: no self-hosting option.

I can't imagine lawyers will be queuing up to host their sensitive legal documents on someone else's server.

The group of people who still do their day-to-day by passing around Word docs via email or LAN likely does not intersect well with the people who fully understand (or have much less heard of) Git.

Thus, I'd remove pretty much all mention of Git from your project landing page (except perhaps to say that it was inspired by its success in the programming world to manage a similar need) so as not to scare off your likely target market (lawyers... who are ALSO notoriously Luddite!)

So Google Docs? It seems close enough. What's the main advantage over Google Docs?

nice work! at my last company we hooked up word docs with SVN. Its very useful to have a workable format for lawyers to update, and then be able to process everything in the back end.

SVN does version control for word documents just fine.

Why do you need admin rights to install?

this is great! congrats on this!

Unfortunately can't check it out because I get "We are checking what's changed in this version. Won't be long..." for any test docx I upload / blank docx. Maybe server overloaded?

My two cents: Congratulations on launching your product! There simply is no real good versioning system for Office files, so this is a step in a good direction.

I agree with others that ditching all the "Git" references would be beneficial, because your target market most likely doesn't care about Git. What is missing in the versioning market is exactly what you may provide: A clear way to see what has changed where and an easy way to merge things together.

I do believe that you are missing a valid comparison / valid take on what Office 365 / SharePoint Online / OneDrive versioning can give you. Your main argument against it is "necessarily want the real-time coauthoring experience offered by Microsoft SharePoint or Google Docs., this can inhibit your ability to determine who is responsible for specific changes to content". Comparing Co-Authoring to versioning is comparing apples and oranges. The co-authoring experience in Microsoft products is great! I can work on a document with multiple people at the same time and I can even see in real-time what part of the document they are working on and what they are changing. We're working with multiple people on important documents simultaneously very often and this is a life saver.

Versioning of course could be better: SharePoint only offers you a main branch and no tags. That means I can go back to a different version, also compare that version to my current version or any other version (!) - but I don't have tags or a method to know that "version 12.0 from 07:02" was the version I was looking for. However the versioning system is very robust and proven. With products such as OneDrive / OneDrive for Business or Office 365 I have said versioning out of the box plus 100 other features. I don't know whether your versioning would make me want to switch just for the additions you show.

What I can't see in your demo (and can't test myself) is how you handle complex changes and this is where the meat is. Changing fox to wolf... yeah... I have documents where all heading format changes from Arial to Times New Roman and the bullet points are arrows now instead of bullets. Also my colleague has added three images and right aligned two of my images, oh yeah and applied some pretty image borders around some images. Would all of that show in the "what has changed" view of Simul? It would show when using SharePoint versioning together with Word. Granted: I can't see all these changes in SharePoint - but Word does show everything perfectly.

Again: Love the way you are going with this. The existing versioning could be made better, but besides branches and tagging I don't see any benefit compared to regular versioning using Microsoft products.

Future of education is plain text