Collaborating: Zoho, Quip and Google Docs make it easy

Working together on a report or book is easy with these relatively old tech tools, which continue to be underused.

Collaborating on a report or book is easy when you use specialist tools such as Zoho Online Office Suite and Quip along with your Microsoft Office and Google Docs. These tools have been around for a long time but are underused. Understand them, and you’ll never email long lists of word changes with page and paragraph numbers to a friend again.

How it works. You create a document and grant others access, usually via email, with full editing or just reading rights. You offer feedback by highlighting text you want to discuss and then write comments in a narrative box. Previous versions of the documents are stored for checking.

If you turn on tracking, you can see every edit that’s been made since the last version, with changes appearing as struck out, underlined, or colour coded. Usually you can toggle between a view with edits and a clean, readable version in a single click.

Options

Google Docs

Collaboration using Google Docs

You email collaborators and assign each a right to view, comment or edit via the File menu. You can swap between editing, suggesting and viewing modes in a dropdown at the top right hand side. Suggesting is the most democratic way to collaborate and lets a second pair of eyes scan proposed changes before they are finalised. Google Docs isn’t the most feature-rich collaboration tool and the presentation is basic, but it’s effective.

Zoho Docs

Using Zoho to collaborate

Zoho Docs is relatively unknown but is part of a massive suite of programs that has collaboration at its heart. The fact it’s free for up to 25 users with 5GB of storage per user is one reason it’s worth trying. As with Docs you can comment on specific text, optionally track changes, suggest edits and accept or reject other people’s changes.

Zoho Writer has more extensive document formatting options than Google Docs. Once you’ve completed a document you can distribute it within an organisation and directly publish to the web, email, post to a blog, mail merge, add an electronic signature and export in formats including PDF and ePub.

You can lock a document to work on it alone, or lock sections of text to prevent further edits. Apps let you work on documents from mobile devices.

Microsoft Word

Collaboration using Microsoft Word

If you’re working in Microsoft Word, both the web and the desktop version of Office support collaboration. The desktop version has extensive options under the Review tab. You can alter how proposed changes are displayed, and accept and reject them individually or in one hit. Word has most of the features discussed above but additionally has powerful options for comparing documents. As well as comparing two versions of a document, it can combine revisions from multiple authors made in separate documents into one.

Quip

Quip is classy but isn’t the cheap option. It starts at $30 per month for a team of five. But it seeks to be an ultimate office collaboration tool. Not only can you collaborate when creating documents and spreadsheets, it also offers direct messaging, task lists, group discussion, a team site, rich import/export options and well developed mobile apps.