Some promising features in Word 2016

[tika-tika]

First, let me say that I am not a fan of MS Office and use Mellel as my main word processor for sole-authored work. But a good deal of my work involves collaborative writing. This often means that I write a first draft in Mellel, then export to Word for others to edit and comment on. This workflow has been discussed in other threads. Increasingly, I am working on collaborative writing documents that require more integration of users in real-time. This has put me onto writing first drafts in Google Docs (yes, I have tried Authorea, DraftIn, Overleaf and others, but finally went back to Google Docs and Flow as a reference manager for it), so other authors can see and make real-time changes and comments.

Word 2016 is promising to cater to collaborative writing by syncing documents real-time with other users, having advanced commenting, and a number of other features. I really like what Mellel has to to offer and can't imagine writing large manuscripts in anything else, but I hope that future iterations of Mellel will stay ahead of this collaboration trend and find a way to package the existing Mellel awesomeness with advanced capabilities for academic collaboration, which will need to take into account reference management conducive to shared libraries.

I suggest that Mellel is still ahead of the pack on stability, advanced formatting and even integration with reference managers (Bookends and Sente at least), but I hope that it can keep ahead of this collaboration curve and generally make word processing collaboration easier. Since Bookends and Sente are not all that hot for using shared reference libraries (compared with EndNote, Colwiz or Paperpile), this might mean better integration with other reference managers as well.

[raymond]

Thanks your details description of upcomig Word 2016.
Unfortunatly, and apparantly, this new version of Word doesn't support R2L writings and editing capacity.
This is a shame.

[rickl]

I don't have any direct response to your request/comment, but thank you for all the great links. I had never heard of most of those sites.

First, let me say that I am not a fan of MS Office and use Mellel as my main word processor for sole-authored work. But a good deal of my work involves collaborative writing. This often means that I write a first draft in Mellel, then export to Word for others to edit and comment on. This workflow has been discussed in other threads. Increasingly, I am working on collaborative writing documents that require more integration of users in real-time. This has put me onto writing first drafts in Google Docs (yes, I have tried Authorea, DraftIn, Overleaf and others, but finally went back to Google Docs and Flow as a reference manager for it), so other authors can see and make real-time changes and comments.

Word 2016 is promising to cater to collaborative writing by syncing documents real-time with other users, having advanced commenting, and a number of other features. I really like what Mellel has to to offer and can't imagine writing large manuscripts in anything else, but I hope that future iterations of Mellel will stay ahead of this collaboration trend and find a way to package the existing Mellel awesomeness with advanced capabilities for academic collaboration, which will need to take into account reference management conducive to shared libraries.

I suggest that Mellel is still ahead of the pack on stability, advanced formatting and even integration with reference managers (Bookends and Sente at least), but I hope that it can keep ahead of this collaboration curve and generally make word processing collaboration easier. Since Bookends and Sente are not all that hot for using shared reference libraries (compared with EndNote, Colwiz or Paperpile), this might mean better integration with other reference managers as well.