A Long Document, Colleagues and Forgetfulness

Working with a long document has always provided challenges from navigating through the content to simply remembering which part of the document you were reading or working on the next time you open it. Then add in the prospect of several people needing to work on the document and pretty soon you end up with either multiple copies or with those multiple tracked changes spread all over the screen.

Word 2013 goes a long way to getting you down the road to that all important final draft regardless of where you were in a document or even where you were when you worked on it.

Imagine that you and your colleagues were required to follow a new rule: You can only ever have one copy of a document regardless of where you might be to edit or read it and also regardless of how many other people need to work on the same document. Having documents stored in a single location is not a new concept by any means although the locations have evolved from network folders to SharePoint. Office 2013 takes the concept to heart when working with document files as well as working with Office itself.

So here's a scenario. You are tasked with working with your sales team to create a bid document that needs to go to a prospective client. The team is based in many locations.  Some at head office, some at regional sites and you mix your time with home, office and on the road.

Sitting at your PC in the office you start Word 2013 and open the Bid Template file straight from SharePoint and create the first draft saved back into SharePoint in the Sales Team Site which is stored as a Share location in Office 2013.  You turn on Track Changes and Lock Changes to prevent them being turned off.  Next you set the view to be Simple Markup so as not to clutter the screen with everyone's edits.  Time is not on your side as you have a meeting to get to. You grab your tablet and go.

Meeting over and you head home on the train. You check your email on the tablet and an Alert is sitting in your inbox telling you that the draft document has changed. Tap the screen to open the document from the SharePoint Alert and you see that two colleagues have added content and edited some of your work. You continue reading the document and add further content using Word Web App with the Touch capabilities that Office 2013 gives you. The changes are automatically saved.

Back home you do some more work on the document on your laptop. When you open the document Word 2013 takes you straight back to where you were last working on it. The document is now many pages long so you swap
to Read Mode and scan the extra pages a colleague has added using the Navigation Pane and close the file.

In the office the next day you open the document on your PC and Word 2013 takes you back to where you had read up to the night before. Last changes are needed to be made and agreed with two colleagues in different offices so you share the document from Word 2013. Within a few minutes the changes have been made by all three of you on the single copy. All changes have been accepted so the document is Inspected and checked for Accessibility and then sent to the client direct from Word 2013.

One copy of the document, multiple authors and many different devices to open the document from different locations. Pretty simple really.  Try it.

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