Working With Real-Time Document Collaboration Tools

Remote work can be a challenge when you’re not used to working with software that allows you to collaborate real-time.

Photo by Matthew Henry from Burst

You’ve been thrust into a brave new world. A new world of document collaboration tools. “Wait!” you cry. “I’ve been collaborating forever with my tools, why do I have new collaboration tools?”. That’s a good question.

Document collaboration, the bad old days

In the past, you’ve been collaborating asynchronously. This is a fancy word that fancy pants developers use to say “not at the same time”. What this really means, is that you created a word document (or excel, or whatever) made some changes, the attached it to an email and sent it to someone else. In the below example, you created “TPS_Report.docx” and sent it to Andrew. (For the rest of this article, I’m going to use the Microsoft Suite as the example. The Google suite of tools is very, very similar in functionality, just that the layout is different.)

Then, either one of two (or three) things happened. Either Andrew has “Track Changes” on, makes a bunch of edits, adds some comments and sends it back still called “TPS_Report.docx”. Or, Andrew would not enable track changes, send it back to you as…