Manually Merging Documents Considered an Acceptable Form of Torture?
In the United States today is [Administrative Professional's Day](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Administrative_Professionals%27_Day), also known as Secretary’s Day, in less politically correct circles. 
These hardy folks work day by day to make our jobs easier, and you probably take for granted one particular task that they take on.
How many documents do you write and collaborate on in any given week, month, or year? How many revisions do you send back and forth for each document? I’d venture to guess that for myself, I probably work on at least 3 documents every month that requires some sort of collaboration with my co-workers. For each document I’d guess that, on average, four to six revisions go back and forth with the occasional document getting many more. This might not sound like a lot, but if you’ve ever been in the middle of the process, manually merging and tracking changes you know how frustrating it can be.
Administrative professionals, those hardy souls who help make management look good, have to do this on an on-going basis and often on behalf of multiple contributors. This task is one of the least rewarding and under appreciated in the corporate world, and it’s a damn shame.
Document Collaboration
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When you need to work together with one or more people to build a document you really only have two options:
1. Designate a **Master of All Changes**. Someone who is responsible for bringing together the contributions of all collaborators into one seamless document.
2. Use a feature of your editing tool, often times Microsoft Word’s Track Changes, and hope for the best.
The problem with #2 is that most tools are not designed for true collaboration. One of the biggest flaws of Microsoft Word’s Track Changes feature is its utter ignorance of parallel editing. This could be the subject of an entire post in and of itself, but suffice it to say that Track Changes simply doesn’t cut it for anyone that lacks Ultra-Mega-Supreme Microsoft Word juju (this isn’t me, and it probably isn’t you, either).
That leaves you with #1. There’s nothing innately wrong with this choice, except for the fact that you’re dooming yourself to the miserable task of human powered document merge. This task is usually delegated to the administrative staff, and will undoubtably add to their collection of gray hairs. In my opinion, this is the equivalent of asking your child’s baby sitter to empty your cat box–it’s just rude. Of course, I understand that most folks would see this task as smack dab in the middle of the job description of the typical administrative assistant, but what really grinds my gears is that in this modern day we haven’t found a better way to do it. With one stroke of software insight we could free thousands of suffering administrative assistants from the menial task of visually parsing, merging, cutting, and pasting to the more appropriate role of telling the boss that the piecemeal contributions that have come in sound like utter crap when read together. **We can do better.**
Collaborative Document Review
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We need a tool that encourages feedback but doesn’t punish the document owner with hours of work. A piece of software that allows the author to easily understand not only what’s changed but also the context in which that change exists against the original and other contributors modifications. Not only should you be able to run the review but the software must allow you to finish where you started, in your editor of choice. You can accept, reject, or discuss the feedback, and when you’re happy with the result, you then download the merged document and carry on with your life. If you write a document in Microsoft Word you should get back a Microsoft Word document that represents the final draft, with all accepted changes and suggestions from the review incorporated. If this existed, I’m fairly certain that world peace would be the logical next step.
The Bad News
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No solution currently exists to empower the collaborative author and reviewer to focus on substance rather than the painful task of managing the collaborative authoring process by hand. The best I can offer is this:
1. Be pedantic about who has the ball. Use a magic number approach to naming the document so you always know who has a more recent version. For example, if you are providing the second set of changes append “-2″ to the document name. Be very careful to only make changes when its your turn and to the most recent version. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve edited the wrong version of a document when it was my turn only to discover the mistake I’ve made many hours later. Unfortunately, by doing this you are no longer executing a true parallel process, but it’s better than nothing.
2. Use the tools you have, but don’t force them to do something they weren’t designed to do. Word’s Track Changes feature is fine if you’re serializing the collaboration process, but once you go parallel you better watch out.
If you have any suggestions on how to manage a collaborative review process let me know, I’d love to hear about them.
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