CurtShannon
I totally agree with your comment. What Microsoft appear to fail to understand is the normal, professional editing process, which involves an Editor, who owns the document. The process is:
- Issue a draft document to all group members and invite comments.
- Merge the comments (which is an area where Word could be improved)
- The editor resolves straightforward comments (normally editorial) and shares the merged document with the group.
- Resolve the remaining comments with group input - normally in face-to face meetings or calls, as there may be differences of opinion.
- Check everyone is happy with the resolutions to their comments and issue a new clean draft
- Repeat the process until the document is ready for publication.
I work on technical specifications, which can typically be several hundred or even thousands of pages, with hundreds of comments gathered in each review round. Many of the contributors will review documents offline, as working collaboratively online with large documents like this isn't efficient - Word crashes too often on this type of complex document.
On the whole, traditional comments work well, helped by few macros which ti appears we all end up writing to fill in the gaps. If Microsoft would like a hit list of what I think could be improved in the editing process, I'd suggest:
- A repair function to clean up large, heavily tracked documents which keep crashing.
- Improvements in merge. Not least where contributors are using different versions of Word (there are still companies who seem to run on 2003).
- More useful editing functions. Start by asking the community what macros they've written and add those as standard functions. Make it easier to filter comments, etc.
- A means to assign an editorial token, so only one person can edit a document - others can only add comments.
- That's about it.
If there's something you'd like to see improved, add it here - let's start a list for Microsoft to understand the needs of professional editors.
Microsoft