4 ms·
Do Word’s native diff features not work for you?
by flatline 8y ago
Do Word’s native diff features not work for you?
- copperx 8y agoDiff works great in Word.
- unsignedint 8y agoAnother option I recommend comparing two Word docs (and just about anything) is Beyond Compare.[0] It's the software you would have to buy, but if you have to compare files a lot I would highly recommend it. (Runs on multiple platforms, too.) [0]: https://www.scootersoftware.com https://www.scootersoftware.com
- TuringTest 8y agoWinMerge does the same, and it's open source. It's only for Windows, though. http://winmerge.org/ http://winmerge.org/
- unsignedint 8y agoYeah, WinMerge a nice tool, too. Aside from multi platform, BC has things like CSV compare and marking unimportant changes are fairly robust. I do personally prefer open source myself, but BC is certainly one of the few that I didn't mind paying for.
- lucb1e 8y agoCan you diff two Word docs with Word? Afaik you can only hit the "track changes" button, which doesn't help if you got a new version of a document from someone else.
- raws 8y agoCompletely new to this: so you're highlighting the differences between two documents in word? say 2 terms of service 1 old and 1 new?
- coldtea 8y agoYes
- PhasmaFelis 8y agoHmmm. Wonder what "track changes" does if you Ctrl-A highlight the entire old doc, and paste the entire new doc over it. (I imagine it registers it as one huge change, rather than tracking a zillion individual changes, but it might be interesting to try.)
- TuringTest 8y agoIt does exactly that. I don't know why someone downvoted you for that comment.
- Terretta 8y agoTools, Track Changes, Compare Documents ... https://support.office.com/en-us/article/compare-and-merge-two-versions-of-a-document-f5059749-a797-4db7-a8fb-b3b27eb8b87e https://support.office.com/en-us/article/compare-and-merge-t... Had this forever, here's a visual on old version of Word: http://www.techyard.net/how-to-compare-two-word-documents-and-find-differences/ http://www.techyard.net/how-to-compare-two-word-documents-an... For more advanced, try legal blacklining: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/compare-document-differences-using-the-legal-blackline-option-dbfc7351-4022-43a2-a0c4-54d1898702a0 https://support.office.com/en-us/article/compare-document-di... Or combine multiple sources of a similar document: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/combine-documents-f8f07f09-4461-4376-b041-89ad67412cfe https://support.office.com/en-us/article/combine-documents-f...
- antt 8y agoNone of that is version control. At best that's a visual based manual patch file tool. That you can't concat two word files together in 2018 is ridiculous.
- wadkar 8y ago> That you can’t concat two word files Of course you can! # cat word1.doc word2.doc > word3.doc Sounds ludicrous? So does your statement. Setting aside the hyperbole, I believe it would be a conceptual nightmare to start defining concat of two docs. For simple cases, feel free to make copy pasta :-)
- majewsky 8y ago> I believe it would be a conceptual nightmare to start defining concat of two docs. Just append the pages of document 2 to the end of document 1. Then the user can decide whether to remove the page break introduced by it. I have this in my env for doing this with PDF: $ cat =concatpdf #!/bin/bash if [ "$1" = "to" ]; then shift gs -q -sPAPERSIZE=letter -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=$* else echo Usage: concatpdf to out.pdf in.pdf in2.pdf in3.pdf fi The peculiar syntax with "to" ensures that I do not invocate it incorrectly.
- thanatropism 8y agoYes, and you can merge changes too. Classic Word workflow: I make a document and send it to my boss; he makes some changes but suggests further research etc. and sends me his altered version, but I stupidly work on my own version. Making this right takes like four clicks.
- yitchelle 8y agoI have been searching for this for a long time and not able to achieve it without resorting to manual copy and paste from one doc to the other. This sounds like utopia. :-) Do you have a link to a page that outlines these steps?
- TuringTest 8y agoIt works if you don't change formatting, don't edit the same section, don't rearrange chapters and don't have lots of changes or a large document. You do any of that, and the application crashes. It's good for a small fix, but not something to rely upon in your main documentation workflow.
- CPAhem 8y agoSyncdocs [0] is also pretty good for merging and tracking changes between Word and Google Docs. It also has a feature with real-time collaboration between Google Docs and Word. [0] https://www.syncdocs.com/ https://www.syncdocs.com/
- fiddlerwoaroof 8y agoEven if you can do it with Word, GUI interactions aren't composable and extensible the way shell commands are, so you're limited to the features the GUI designer thought of.
- coldtea 8y ago>GUI interactions aren't composable and extensible the way shell commands are They might not be in word, but they absolutely can be, and in fact are a superset of CLI interactions (since a GUI interaction step in e.g. Automator can invoke any shell command). >so you're limited to the features the GUI designer thought of And in the traditional shell pipeline (that is, not Powershell) I'm limited to working on dumb streams from one command to another.