
Show HN: Version Control for Microsoft Word - ben-morris
https://www.simuldocs.com/blog/ben-morris/version-control-for-microsoft-word
======
runako
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!

~~~
rockmeamedee
Plugging these patio11 posts because a)they might be helpful if OP hasn't read
them and b)even if OP has, somebody else here might not and they're pretty
much evergreen:

The Black Art of SaaS Pricing:
[https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/saas_pric...](https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/saas_pricing)

Doubling Saas Revenue by Changing the Pricing Model:
[http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/08/13/doubling-saas-
revenue/](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/08/13/doubling-saas-revenue/)

Selling To The Fortune 500, Government, And Other Lovecraftian Horrors:
[https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/enterpris...](https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/enterprise_sales)

Patrick's default pricing model:
[https://twitter.com/patio11/status/479095257284345857](https://twitter.com/patio11/status/479095257284345857)

~~~
Beltiras
Just to echo Patrick's default pricing model. If it's too cheap (and you
currently are), I would not trust the developer having resources to make the
product stable enough for me to trust it with my data. Also, it costs money to
go through certification (without which you will not penetrate the market
where this pain point is clearest).

------
bambax
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!

~~~
flamtap
Agreed on all points. This has law firms written all over it.

~~~
kobeya
Law firms that will happily pay hundreds or thousands of dollars per seat. OP,
you're selling yourself short.

------
tmaly
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.

~~~
wraithm112
Legal/compliance work is probably where this sort of service would be most
useful.

~~~
brockvond
1000% agree.

------
emodendroket
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.

~~~
jessaustin
I hope OP helps lots of people, because if they've been so abused by their
computers as to think "Track Changes" is anything other than a torture device,
they really need help.

~~~
emodendroket
It'd probably work better if more people used the "accept/reject"
functionality. But yeah it can be awful.

------
Beltiras
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.

------
aplaice
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...](http://blog.riemann.cc/2013/04/23/versioning-of-openoffice-
libreoffice-documents-using-git/)

[https://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/msg48067.h...](https://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/msg48067.html)

~~~
kairuku
Word can also save in flat XML format, but it's really verbose (really just a
listing of all the document parts).

~~~
rubidium
And I can "build a car". But I wouldn't want to drive it.

------
gigelu
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.

~~~
rayiner
It doesn't scale. _E.g._ a common operation in a law firm is to send a draft
of a Word document,[1] to several people for revisions and comments. You get
back several redlines against a common version that some junior associate then
has to integrate manually.

[1] It has to be a word document for integration with tooling that does stuff
like generating tables of authorities and whatnot.

~~~
TickleSteve
the built-in 3-way merge tool will do that... just set it up to be called from
your favourite VCS.

------
nvlr
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.

~~~
mark212
This isn't as absolute as you'd think, at least in the firms I've seen here in
the US. Nearly all have shifted to cloud solutions for some documents at least
in the litigation world where I dwell, especially in doc production and
discovery. In a recent class action, my team was sent opposing counsel's link
to the Box folder with their 4gb+ docs sent over from their client. Which
shows that the clients are demanding that their outside counsel use some of
the tools that they've embraced.

You're right with respect to internal memos, notes, drafts of pleadings, etc.
But I suspect this is changing too as more lawyers want to be able to work on
docs from their phones and iPads and remote laptops.

------
btown
If all you need is to diff documents (Word, Excel, PPT, or arbitrary PDFs)
then I can't recommend
[https://draftable.com/compare](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.

~~~
emodendroket
Office comes with a spreadsheet diff tool since 2013 and I think there might
be something like that for Word too.

~~~
TickleSteve
There is. There is also 'diff' integration with the Tortoise range of tools
also (i.e. TortoiseSVN, etc).

------
Sander_Marechal
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)

~~~
WorldMaker
I did something similar: I built a tool in Python called musdex to use in git
(or any other VCS) hooks to extract the zip file that a docx/odf file is
before commits and recombine them on pull/merge (essentially treating the
docx/odf as something of the build product of the repo). Run an xml lint tool
on the XML in them and you get decent diffs.

------
nickstefan12
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](https://github.com/decisive-
wizard/GridHub))

------
irl_
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.

~~~
bonniemuffin
I don't think people who already use git and latex are the target audience for
this.

~~~
microcolonel
Then they shouldn't market based on it.

~~~
Cthulhu_
I agree. Git / version control is too complicated for most people. Doesn't
Microsoft have its own collaborative editing / version control system in
Office365 yet?

~~~
microcolonel
Office365 does have versioning. I'm not going to say this is better or worse,
but it does exist.

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

~~~
titanix2
It includes at least me :) I switched to Latex for writing my second master
thesis because I wanted to use version control but Word is far more easier to
deal with when the document include unicode character outside the BMP. So I
really wanted Word + git from that time.

Also when collaborating for writing a paper with Word, version control can be
a huge help.

~~~
TrickyRick
Why not use something like Google docs or office 365 then?

~~~
emodendroket
Word has way more features than GDocs. Haven't spent time with O365 but as far
as I know half the draw is you can use it with Office.

------
koolba
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.

------
micah_chatt
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_...](https://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_the_internet_will_one_day_transform_government)

------
bArray
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 :)

~~~
mark212
I'll answer some of these questions for the developer, because I'm smack in
the middle of their target market: litigation attorney.

Anything other than Word is a non-starter for 99% of law firms (and the other
1% is still on WordPerfect). Markdown is awesome and I use it for my notes
files and all kinds of things but contracts, settlement docs, pleadings,
motions, etc etc all exist strictly and only in Word. And probably 50% of
those are still .doc format, which was left behind more than a decade ago in
Word 2007.

This product, if it works, will be a God-send for firms like mine (small to
medium litigation shops that don't use full document assembly software with
built-in version control like the AmLaw 100 firms. And it looks like even
those firms might profit from this solution if it plays well with their
customer style sheets and macros.

I wish it were different, but sadly the state of legal tech is mired in the
late '90s.

~~~
nylnd
Another lawyer here (tax, UK) - there are similar products available and
they're pretty commonly-used over here (such as Worksite for DKMS/version
control and Workshare for comparisons between docs).

But the VC tends to be centralised, rather than distributed. I've often
hankered after a more git-like experience when working remotely or offline,
and I will follow this project with interest.

One area that is underserved at the moment is diffing .ppt files. Since a lot
of the tax industry in particular uses PowerPoint for step plans and structure
papers (because it is generally easier to build structure charts). Whilst it
isn't the right tool for the job, for as long as people continue to use it,
getting this working on your app would be huge.

~~~
asr
I'm pretty sure the latest version of worksite/workshare (never was sure which
is which or what all the names are) can diff PPT files; apologies if I'm
misremembering but that is my recollection from my firm.

I agree the developer needs to take a look at these if he/she has not already
but there's plenty of room to improve on those products; I don't think the
existence of some mediocre solutions should put the developer off.

------
rsp1984
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!

~~~
TickleSteve
it already exists... version control tools can start Word to compare and merge
.doc files.

------
Nomentatus
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.

------
thebiglebrewski
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!

~~~
TickleSteve
Word has a diff tool built in. There is also integration with version control
(i.e. double click in TortoiseSVN for example brings up a correct diff view of
the word doc for 3-way merging).

------
yazan94
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?

------
therealmarv
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.

~~~
emodendroket
I've had multiple frustrating conversations where I tried to get people to
stop using the strategy of copying entire folders in SharePoint to get some
kind of versioning, so they might be right.

------
makecheck
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.

------
jk2323
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.

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

[http://willgrant.org/post/idea-dump-6/](http://willgrant.org/post/idea-
dump-6/)

------
forkLding
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

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

~~~
dbot
Most DMSes utilize a "check-in/check-out" process, meaning that only one
person can work the document. Others can work on "copies," but there is no way
to sync their changes back into the main document stored in the DMS.

~~~
scblock
Exactly. It means incompatible changes have to be merged manually later. It
causes problems with large reports where, for example, an electrical engineer
may be editing one section and a civil engineer another, but only one can have
the document checked out at a time. It's possible to break large reports up
into many small section reports, but that's a workaround to the real issue.

It also means that when someone checks a file out and then goes home for the
weekend without checking it back in no one can update the file in the DMS
without administrator support.

------
davidpelayo
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!

------
ythn
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

------
ZenoArrow
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.

------
pmarreck
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!)

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

~~~
IanWhalen
The addition of tags/versions is something that I would kill for in Google
Docs. It would make life so much easier in my current role if we had the
ability to tag a version so that you can easily see a diff between that
_specific, tagged_ version and the current version (rather than just seeing
diffs over time as it is currently implemented).

~~~
brazzledazzle
There's an add-on you can get in whatever marketplace they have. But I hate
using those because it's not clear to me what these third parties can or can't
see. I found it when I realized that despite Google storing extensive change
history they hardly do anything with it.

~~~
IanWhalen
I feel like I've searched pretty extensively but not found such an add-on. If
you can remember the name and link it here that would be awesome.

------
mholmes680
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.

------
user5994461
SVN does version control for word documents just fine.

~~~
TickleSteve
it absolutely does... with word integration also...

...but people here irrationally hate svn, so you're getting unfairly
downvoted.

------
fleurdelotus
Why do you need admin rights to install?

------
brockvond
this is great! congrats on this!

------
moontear
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.

------
tandav
Future of education is plain text

