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Asked: 2026-05-10T15:11:30+00:00

I am in charge of about 100+ documents (word document, not source code) that

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I am in charge of about 100+ documents (word document, not source code) that needs revision by different people in my department. Currently all the documents are in a shared folder where they will retrieve, revise and save back into the folder.

What I am doing now is looking up the ‘date modified’ in the shared folder, opened up recent modified documents and use the ‘Track Change’ function in MS Word to apply the changes. I find this a bit tedious.

So will it be better and easier if I commit this in a version control database?

Basically I want to keep different version of a file.

What have I learn from answers:

  • Use Time Machine to save different version (or Shadow copy in Vista)

  • There is a difference between text and binary documents when you use version control app. (I didn’t know that)

  • Diff won’t work on binary files

  • A notification system (ie email) for revision is great

  • Google Docs revision feature.

Update :

I played around with Google Docs revision feature and feel that it is almost right for me. Just a bit annoyed with the too frequent versioning (autosaving).

But what feels right for me doesn’t mean it feels right for my dept. Will they be okay with saving all these documents with Google?

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1 Answer

  1. I guess one thing that nobody seems to have asked is if you have a legal requirement to store history of changes to the doc’s?

    Whether you do or don’t is going to have an impact on what solutions you can consider.

    Also a notification mechanism for out of date copies is also a bundle of fun. If engineer A has a copy of a document and engineer B then edits it and commits the changes you want engineer A to be notified that his copy is out of date.

    Document control can become a real can of worms quite easily.

    Maybe keep the doc’s under CVS or SVN and set it up so that emails are generated to whoever has checked out a copy when updates for the same doc. are checked in to the repository?

    Edit: I forgot to add don’t forget to use the binary switch, e.g. -kb for CVS, when adding the new doc. Otherwise, you will get any sequences of data that happen to match the ascii for keyword strings having the relevant config management data appended thereby corrupting your doc. data.

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