Mohtalim

Much of my professional output is Powerpoint, Word, Excel, Visio, and so on. (Apparently, I am part of the MS Empire.) My workflow is completely dicked. I have millions of files around and if I bother to version things at all it is by appending "_v1" and incrementing every time I make a serious change.

When I do write code, I of course use some kind of IDE with integrated version control which makes backing out major changes a snap. I am really not sure why I have been doing this for so long and not developed a decent workflow.

Does anyone have any suggestions? One option is Time Machine. Requires an initial outlay of cash money, but is 100% supported for what I need to do. Git is a hack, as far as I can tell there are no options for integration with my editors of choice. Is there a native MS option, or another vendor with something along those lines?

Word (and maybe some of the other Office applications) has some version control support built into itself. It can graphically compare and merge documents. So, one option is configure your version control client of choice to delegate .doc[x] diffs to Word. A project I was on about ten years ago had Rational Clearcase set up that way, and it worked pretty nicely. Unfortunately, on every project since, the Office file authors I've worked with refused to use any version control software, so I'm not sure what the state of the art is.

You can also get decent short term versioning with Track Changes. It normally shows all of the unaccepted deltas, which basically limits you to only two versions (though you can accept or roll back each delta independently). If there's a way to filter the deltas by date or "version", then Word's basically a DVCS, though the UI is probably not well optimized for typical version control tasks.

Hmm, looks like out-of-the-box TortoiseSVN supports .doc comparisons using Word. It's uses a pretty ugly script to do it, but I assume there's a plain old command line interface too.

If you want to go all in with MS you can setup a sharepoint portal, it handles versioning of your files

You know, I have a sharepoint. I may actually do that. Doesn't it have some kind of directory sync feature?