Google Docs Lacks a Merge Feature
Google Docs is great for collaborating on a document. Yet, once a document is released, Google Docs provides few tools to manage change. Sure there is Suggest Mode, which allows up you mark up changes to the existing document. Yet, until the changes are accepted, they do not reflect the truth. In the process, the document is all marked up and sometimes even hard to read.
To work around these limitations, I make a copy of the original document and mark it up, get it reviewed and revise it a few times. This approach has several issues. First of all, merging the changes is a cumbersome manual process. You could do a Replace All, assuming, that nobody else is taking the same approach. Yet, that approach messes up the change log of the original document. This workaround isn’t very practical.
What I really want is a Branch, Pull Request, and Merge capability. I’ll settle for Merge. Microsoft Word has the Combine feature. It has been a while since I used Word, though I seemed to recall it provided features to merge changes.
There are some add-ons to bring Merge to Google Docs. I haven’t tried them yet. Generally, I shy away for these add-ons to our company documents. It would be great to have Merge as a native Google Docs capability, wouldn’t it?