Yeah, well, you know, that’s just, like, your workflow, man.

I caught some flack at work this week: I circulated an early draft of a document that I was struggling with in plain text¹ and my boss was very clear that he wanted me to use Word in the future so there would be change tracking and out-of-band comments. On the plus side those remarks came packaged up with some useful suggestions for the piece.

Once I tamped down my reflexive defensiveness and the basic anxiety that comes with screwing up at work, I pulled up my big kid underwear and moved on. Then, having decided to be an adult about this, I ran smack dab into a counter example for $BOSS's point. I received a second set of highly useful changes in the same document. Conflicting changes. I'm not aware of any good tooling to handle conflicting changes in Word, but it was no problem for me to handle the conflicts in my text document: I just opened the files in my favorite visual merge tool.² and got on with it.

Caveat time. To take the "plain text means we can use good tools" thing seriously we'd want to put all our draft work in VC repositories, and when that occurred to me my first reaction was "Who'd want to do that?" I mean, yeah that makes sense for major pieces of writing, but it's not obvious that you want to maintain a full history on every minor document you bang out day in and day out.

But then I had another thought...

Caveat on the caveat. Which was "Hey, how do people who are really committed to Word deal with the possibility of conflicting changes, anyway?" A little poking around the web suggest that my employer's answer is completely mainstream. At the management tier we put everything in SharePoint and let it enforce serialized editing, so they're already putting all their work in a repository. Maybe the whole idea isn't so silly after all.

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¹ Now, I would never send plain text to the clients, but I often do my initial composition in text because the sense of informality helps me feel safe trying out different formulations in search of a natural arc through complex subjects.

² Meld as it happens. But not because I've tried all the options: it was just the first one I spent any time with and it's been consistently available.