While correct in the sense of word and versioning via mail being a nightmare, I really don't think you can expect anyone to learn latex just so they can comment in your document. I would have offered to send a pdf. Shoot me.

you can still use word with git. it's versioning first, diffing and merging only where possible. since you probably won't branch you won't need the latter, though.

I'm going to send you a pdf, you van email me back with the notes or comments in the PDF itself, whatever souts your fancy, and I'll keep those notes and send you a new PDF with them.

I did this and I had no issues with any of the thesises I have submitted in my bachelors or masters.

First year calculus teacher, thank you SO much for forcing us to write submissions in latex.

Also, overleaf is a thing, this is not like my 1st year of uni, this 11 years later or so. If your fucking professor never heard of latex they are just bad at academia and shouldn't be teaching honestly. It's not just about the field knowledge.

I've had the built in version control do unexpected things, so I play it safe and create named backup files. I usually end up using that one file, but I've been saved on occasion

Its just not trustworthy

Use date/time in your file name,using GMT:

Metrics of Sales 2024-05-22_14-29.docx

Very unlikely to have 2 docs with the same down-to-the-minute time stamp in the name.

Done it and highly recommend it

Wait there are other ways to write a resume?

Haha my first thought seeing this meme is "do you want to start writing LaTeX by hand? Because this is how you start..."

But better for LaTeX

That's why we wrote our thesis in LaTeX: https://github.com/jonte/GGS-report/blob/a9d9d20bcc22a524629e371ce5984f131490b743/report.lyx#L362

Unzip the docx with a pre-commit hook

(This is not a serious suggestion)

.gitattributes can invoke Word on windows to diff versions, and there are plenty of open source scripts that can do it if you don't have a copy of Word (or Windows) lying around.

But Word is like shit for papers. Use LaTeX instead.

Why on Earth would you curse yourself with MS Office anyway, especially if writing docs is your professional responsibility?

Why not use Git+Markdown+Pandoc, have your copy, data and layout separate?

I understand that a lot of istitutions/companies impose stylistic/technical requirements for docs and publications, - still doesn't mean you gotta stay married to the worst tooling.

Still better than using file names.

Let me tell you something. I cannot tell you what company, but I have been tasked with putting Excel files in git "because they are just zip archives with xml" and it is just a disaster. Everytime you save the document it will save certain parts of the xml code in arbitrary ways (like each image is in a list and the order of that list is random everytime), some metadata is re-written everytime like time of last modified and finally all the xml files are one single line. The git diffs are complete useless and noisy and just looking at the Excel file will cause git to consider it updated. So sure, you can use git to snapshot you Office documents... But just don't.

R markdown is awesome. I'd always use it for my biostatistics tests and assignments.

Overleaf is easy to use and has tutorials for LaTeX

Never heard of latex but I can help you with Git.

What you want to know?

You don't. You could try overleaf or some wysiwyg editor for LaTeX, but both need some getting used to and at least a minute amount of effort. Overleaf probably has the lowest barrier of entry (0 set up required), but is a paid service.

It depends on what sort of collaboration. For things on which I was the sole author, like my dissertation, I leveraged the miracle that is pandoc. Every email my advisor got from me was a perfectly formatted Word doc with a flawless bibliography and he never had to learn what the hell LaTeX is.

But if you have multiple contributors going back and forth, or need to keep long-lived discussions in the track changes panel, you’re better off not trying to teach others a new tool. Unless they have a genuine interest in it, in which case the WYSIWYG editors can be fun.

Git is a tool that makes it convenient and lightweight to keep past snapshots of a directory of text files (called a repository) and compare them. It also makes it easy to have multiple people work in parallel on the content of the directory, see the differences and merge everything into a common version. It is essential in programming, it's called versioning or version control.
Although it is not easy to access for non programmers because it's based on slightly obscure command lines. So it's a bit of an over-engineering to use it for a single file edited by a single person. Especially because you can now put those on the cloud and have some form of version control that allows to easily compare and go back to previous versions graphically.
It may be worth it if it's a long document that you work upon for a long time, such as a PhD thesis.

Git tracks changes for a folder full of code (aka "repo") between saves (called "commits") so you can revert back to previous versions. It's intended for software but there's nothing stopping you from using it for documents