We're building version control software for Microsoft Office documents that works as well as Git and GitHub do for code.<p>Today, we’re releasing the first component, Draftable for Word, an Office add-in that lets you generate side-by-side diffs, and makes it way less painful to work with Track Changes.<p>Our diffs are designed to look right to humans — instead of machines — showing changes as they might actually have been made by an editor.<p>We'd love to hear your feedback. We’d also love to fix what you find painful about authoring and collaborating on Microsoft Office documents, so get in touch!<p>https://draftable.com
I NEED THIS FOR EXCEL!<p>There's been a few discussions about Excel on HN recently and it's such a major tool in so many organizations and keeping track of changes is a nightmare.<p>Here's a classic example:<p>- Budgeting model for company with ~10 employees and 8 departments. Model has 30 or so sheets. Tracks all assumptions on the revenue and expense sides. Great model, built well, works excellently.<p>- CFO goes in and changes the conversion assumptions for the year.<p>- I go into the model after the CFO, notice that net income increased by $500,000 since the last time I looked at it. WHAT THE HELL CHANGED?<p>Now take this example and imagine you're on a late night call with the CEO, CFO, and CMO. Ideas and thoughts are going back and forth. "Hey, what does it do to revenue if we change assumption A from X to Y?" ... "OK, I like that. What about changing assumption B from W to Z?" ... "Nah, let's not do that."<p>At the end of the call I have our updated model that everyone is happy with... but I have no way to easily and reliably see exactly what was changed.<p>The only thing I currently do is setup a reconciliation sheets on the income statement. For each version of the model, I create a new sheet and copy/paste values from the income sheet then I can do a diff and see what numbers changed. This works well, but there's got to be a better way.<p>PLEASE FIX THIS.
I publish a magazine, and we've been wishing for essentially this exact tool for years and years. As soon as I looked at the demo images on the site, I called two of our editors over excitedly and showed it to them. They both literally shouted with joy.<p>Then we saw that it was Windows-only.<p>The publishing industry runs on Macs. Please, develop for OS X. I can't think of a single person in publishing who wouldn't happily pay for this right now.
This reminds me: it blows my mind how far behind the publishing industry is in terms of technology. I'm currently editing a tech book, and I get the assets from them as a Word doc and images for the figures in a zip file. I have then "track changes" in Word, save the file, and send it back. For the images, if there is an error, I have to take a new screenshot, write in the doc that there was an error, and then send back a zip file with the new image(s).<p>This would be SO much easier with github. I could just make my edits and issue a pull request, which would work with the image too. I could even use the commit messages to explain what the error was if need be. Github even has tools to make this process easier for non-tech people (which honestly there shouldn't be since it is a tech book!).<p>This will be made easier by this tool, but sadly not for me.
You're 2 years late, I've finished writing my book!<p>Joke aside, I think that's awesome. While writing a book and getting feedback from lots of people (tech review, copy review, etc..) it slowly became a nightmare to decipher, more than actually read, Word documents full of colorful revisions. I would have seriously loved a tool like this.
Word already has this capability through their track changes feature. You can even use it to open two documents and see a third document showing what has changed.<p>How does Draftable improve on what Word has been offering for years?
I could have used this in the past three months! I suppose after summer I might put it to use again during school. I haven't tried it yet, but the title sounds very promising. Nice work!<p>PS. Heads up: Mind the guidelines:<p>> "Don't abuse the text field in the submission form to add commentary to links. The text field is for starting discussions. If you're submitting a link, put it in the url field. If you want to add initial commentary on the link, write a blog post about it and submit that instead."
Office 2013 brings some powerful compare options for Word and Excel:<p>Spreadsheet Inquire (need to enable an included COM add-in which requires .Net 4) <a href="http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/what-you-can-do-with-spreadsheet-inquire-HA102835926.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/what-you-can-do...</a><p>Compare (included in Word by default) <a href="http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word-help/compare-is-under-review-HT103307962.aspx?CTT=1" rel="nofollow">http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word-help/compare-is-under...</a>
Really nice work, you guys.<p>Also, nice timing. I recently posted a hobby project to HN that is very similar :)<p><a href="http://www.nicediff.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.nicediff.com</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5599229" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5599229</a><p>The ribbon support within word itself is great. The ability to link to specific sections of the diff is also a handy feature.
One other use-case I could suggest: I once got caught in the middle of a contract negotiation between our in-house lawyers, and one at a service provider. This negotiation mostly consisted of sending back and forth Word documents with "Track Changes" turned on.
See also: Softinterface Diff Doc [1]. I have never tried it though.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.softinterface.com/MD/Document-Comparison-Software.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.softinterface.com/MD/Document-Comparison-Software...</a>
you might (or might not) wanna look at what i did recently.<p>> <a href="http://zenmagiclove.com/phrase-change-sample.html" rel="nofollow">http://zenmagiclove.com/phrase-change-sample.html</a><p>> <a href="http://zenmagiclove.com/phrase-change-display.html" rel="nofollow">http://zenmagiclove.com/phrase-change-display.html</a><p>you likely want to stick with your side-by-side display.<p>(as it seems that you feel this is your primary advantage.)<p>but still, isolating the changes so that they occur on
a phrase which is presented coherently on its own line
is something i believe you would find improves results.<p>i've got lots more to come, and am actively working on this.<p>-bowerbird
Pictures added or removed are not shown. Changed formatting is not shown. Text modified in text boxes is not shown.<p>Doesn't provide many more features than piping antiword to your favorite text-based diff-tool. Only difference i've managed to find is that with draftable you get formatted headers.<p>I'm also a bit confused, is the diff running on your server or on my computer? Your EULA keeps talking about "hosted services" but the only thing available on the website is this tool i install on my computer, no hosted services as far as i can see.