What experience do you all have in collaboratively editing Word documents in late 2019?
Yesterday, a group of collaborators and I were making the final push to submitting a grant proposal to the NSF due yesterday (spoiler alert: we made it!) Until the very last day, we were all using Google Docs and Google Drive, which is a fantastic collaborative environment. Then to get the documents formatted, the Google Docs were downloaded to the lead collaborator's computer. This move then made collaborative editing/copyediting of the document tricky. For a while, we were confused about which document was the most recent. We couldn't see easily see what other edits people had made. It wasn't clear that the approach that some of us took (to use Track Changes in Word) and then send our version of the document to the lead author) was actually the right -- and consensus -- approach.
Are others of you taking a similar approach: do a lot of collaborative editing in Google Docs and then do final editing/formatting in Word? How about using Microsoft Office for the Web for the entire writing process? I'm wondering how compatible online Word is with desktop Word, especially for detailed formatting.