In a comment to one of my recent posts (1, 2) on converting from Org mode to Word doc format, Grant Rettke pointed me to an interesting Org Mode mailing list thread on how academics leverage Org mode for writing their research articles. It’s a great thread and if you have a need to convert your Org documents to doc format, it’s definitely worth reading.
One problem that arises when collaborating with a Word-using colleague is that they will want to turn on tracking and make their changes and comments directly in the document. You can, of course, simply copy the changes back into your Org document but that’s a hassle. Happily, in one of the posts, Ken Mankoff outlines a method for getting those changes back into your Org document. Rettke captures the method in a recent post on his blog.
Once you have the Org document with the changes, you can do an ediff with the original to chose the changes you want to keep. For more on that idea, see Mickey Petersen’s post on writing a book with Emacs. He didn’t use Org mode but he did deal with integrating editorial changes back into his master file.