Why Document Editing Sucks

Moses contemplating if he transcribed the words correctly

Collaborating on documents has sucked since the days of Athenian orators yelling in town squares and scribes etching their words in stone tablets. Here’s a short history of document editing:

• Invention of Scrolls. Easier to carry around than stone tablets (USPS thanks you) but still mad annoying to roll up/unwind. Also, you had to wait for the ink to dry and you had to use straighteners to read long scrolls.
• Invention of Codex. Replaced the scroll and made it easy to turn pages. Much better than carrying around a rolled up scroll. Super cool but still very tedious to manually write out the same thing thousands of times so it was hard to popularize text.
• Printing Press. This made it easy to mass produce text but still hard to edit/collaborate. You also needed access to a printing press to get your stuff out to the public.
• Typewriters. This enabled modern offices to type out memos/docs in real-time. Flaw: You had to use white-out to edit them and they were still paper based. You had to mail your document to someone else for them to read it.
• Fax. This enabled people in two different places to send a document in somewhat real-time in a secure fashion. Flaw: You had to physically be there to get the document. If you wanted to edit it, you had to write your own version and then send it back.
• Microsoft Word. This enabled people to electronically send document files to each other and then download them to edit on their own. Flaw: You had to then send it back to the other person/new person and then they’d send back their edits as a new file. Files on files on files.
• Google Docs. This enabled people to collaborate in real-time on the same document file. Flaw: Hard to collaborate across companies, hard to keep track of versioning, and hard to dynamically update values in the document. If you used Microsoft office products, you couldn’t use Google. If you used Google products, you couldn’t use Microsoft office products.

TLDR: Collaborating on documents has been horrible for centuries. Why?

1. People are worried about security. If I send you a file that you can edit, you change the intent of the document. This had serious ramifications in business and religion throughout history.
2. Access to tools. Whenever a new tool is adopted, it takes time for it to become accessible to the masses.

I believe it’s time for a new generation of document editing tools. We need tools that allow you to securely send documents, track changes, and dynamically update data. Right now, all these concepts exist but not in a document. You can send a PDF that is password protected but it’s pretty complicated to edit in in real-time with someone from another company. You can track changes in Github with code versioning but you can’t merge changes in a traditional office doc/google doc. You can dynamically update data with formulas in Google Sheets but you can’t insert values into Google Docs/Microsoft Word that instantaneously update based on what’s in your internal database.

Imagine a world where we can do the following:

• Securely send a document and only restrict access to the person who received it. If a new person wants access, they have to ask the original person. (This exists for Google docs but not for PDFs)
• Imagine having 5 different people looking at different versions of your doc and making edits. Wouldn’t it be beautiful if you could merge their changes to your master document so that you didn’t have to keep track of each of the changes in each document?
• Ever had to do math in a spreadsheet and update your document like 10 times when the math changes? It’s horrible. Imagine the ability to insert dynamic values into your document that update organically based on what changes in a master spreadsheet/database.
• Why does every document have to have the same view? We can update Slack themes/gmail backgrounds but we can’t adapt document views? Each person should be able to read a document in the view of their choice (i.e. Dark Mode, font type, margins, font size, color schemas). Reading should be fun.
• Why is commenting on documents so painful? We should be able to thread comments in the same way we can thread Slack messages. A document should be like a dinner party. There’s a centralized reason for everyone coming but there should be tons of small conversations that delight each person without interfering with the rest of the guests. Our current commenting process on documents clutters the document UI, is hard to track beyond 2 comments, and is hard to action.
• Editing a document on mobile is like trying to catch a moving train pulling out of the station. There’s a brief glimpse of hope that you might be able to jump on but it never works out like 99% of the time and you just end up frustrated. We deserve better than just the ability to type in words on a document on mobile devices. We need to get creative about how to make it easier on the user to do the same things that they do on desktops on mobile for document editing.

While all of these concepts sound intriguing, the real impact is in industries that are bottlenecked by document collaboration (healthcare, government, legal). How can we enable doctors to collaborate across healthcare providers in a secure way so that patients can get care faster? How can we enable governmental agencies to exchange different levels of classified documents to each other and then merge the changes in a secure fashion?

Let’s stop coming up with software that allows you to just collaborate in a new place and come up with software that changes the way we communicate and share ideas.