This is a week where I have gone back to catch up on new features in tools I have reviewed in the past, it seems. Earlier today I wrote about new features in Asana (see It’s the little things that make some tools great), and in this post I am revisiting Quip, that I’ve written about before (see Quip 1.5 adds new features, but not the ones I want, and I want a social editor, but Quip isn’t there quite yet).

Importing

Quip introduced importing of documents in November, but 1.7 still lacks exporting. It’s all well and good to pull in a Microsoft Word document or a Google Doc, and be able to edit it and share in on Quip, but if I can’t export it to a Microsoft Word dominated world, then it’s still a large scale problem, especially if I have crafted something with tables, or when I want to conserve Quip comments, which are now very, very cool.

Still, they do support importing from Evernote, Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft Word documents. But not Apple Pages.

Paragraph Comments

In this 1.7 release, Quip has introduced Medium-style, paragraph comment threads. Here’s a document called Testaroni, showing a paragraph-level comment.

Along the left hand margin is the activity stream of the document, which also shows the paragraph comment, but the paragraph comment can always be accessed by clicking on the comment icon (which is what the plus sign icon turns into).

Interesting that every bullet in a list and every table row can now have its own comments thread, as can any selected section of text:

Inline comments were the most requested feature for Quip, and it certainly makes it much more attractive for social use.

There is one downside of this implementation. If I mistakenly edit two paragraph together, by deleting the paragraph end between them, then the comment thread of the bottom paragraph is lost. I think they should either a/conserve it in the merged paragraph, or b/ warn the user. Yes, you can undo those changes, but you have to realize what you’ve done.

Themes

One of the negatives of the no-frills and no-messing-with-style approach of Quip is that you couldn’t — until now — change the look of documents very much. Quip has now introduced a few more themes for documents, aside from the default, which is now called Atlas:

I suppose at some point in the future Quip may allow users to define their own styles, but not yet.

Likes

Quip 1.7 includes a new feature: users can click the star now present on changes and comments:

I have found that the haptic messaging around likes on Tumblr, ‘hearts’ on Asana, and ‘cheers’ on Mightybell are a low-friction means to keep a sense of connection and support.

Versioning

Quip now says the system supports full versioning, but I don’t really understand how it works, and there is basically nothing written in the help system about it. It seems that any change can be undone, but what I was looking for was a more traditional scheme where I could a/ number versions with a comment about changes made, and b/ compare differences between any two versions.

The Bottom Line

Quip is evolving pretty fast, and in the right direction. I like the lightweight feel of the tool, and the minimal, web first orientation of the Quip notion of a document, which ignores the convention of physical pages, and headers and footers, too. The social dimension in the system is where we are seeing the most rapid innovation, and I like what is emerging. If only it would support exporting to Word and Google Docs, and a roundtrip with Apple’s Pages — including internal comments —  I’d be a happy and contented user.