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What's a good program to compare MS Word files that beats Word's own comparison function?

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Honestly, you're going to be hard pressed to beat Word's own comparison tool. Say what you will about MS, but they do get something right from time to time. – AnonJr Jul 29 '09 at 13:04
I've seen one that even tells you where the text has been moved from, etc. Unforunately, I forget the app's name. Word is good and usually does an excellent job, no question, but there are better comparison tools for very complex changes. – guillermooo Jul 29 '09 at 17:46
Word's own compare tool is ok - but I wish it would highlight changes in the two versions of the doc being compared, it just marks up a 'combined' version. – Adam Aug 23 '10 at 16:53
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3 Answers

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Workshare Professional 5.2 (not free)

Workshare Professional provides accurate PDF and document comparison, document control for easy and secure management of multi-person document reviews, metadata removal, secure PDF creation and sharing, and complete information security.

Document Comparison

  • Create comparisons (DeltaView’s) 10x faster
  • Compare Word-Word, PDF-PDF, Word-PDF & PDF-Word
  • Compare one document to multiple versions
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up vote 3 down vote

From StackOverflow two related questions:

I think TortoiseSVN should be able to do version control, which essentially let's you compare two documents which are nearly the same. Plus it's free!

Edit: Here's a HowTo that should answer any questions.

From a SO answer by Greg Hewgill:

I've worked with Word documents in SVN. With TortoiseSVN, you can easily diff Word documents (between working copy and repository, or between two repository revisions). It's really slick and definitely recommended.

The other thing to do if you're using Word documents in SVN is to add the svn:needs-lock property to the Word documents. This will prevent two people from trying to edit the same document at the same time, since unfortunately there's no good way to merge Word documents.

With the above two things, handling revision controlled Word documents is at least tolerable. It certainly beats the alternative of using a shared folder and track-changes.

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Can you confirm that it's really possible to diff the content of Word documents with TortoiseSVN? (Not just the "binary files differ" kind of diff that Subversion itself provides.) – Jonik Jul 29 '09 at 10:58
Well I don't use it myself and I found it very hard to find a HowTo. If I find one, ill update my post. Though I know for sure I read somewhere that it should work fine. – Ivo Flipse♦ Jul 29 '09 at 11:04
I just noticed: I think it still uses Word's own comparison function... – Ivo Flipse♦ Jul 29 '09 at 11:09
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That's correct Tortoise does hand off the comparison to Word. – Sliff Jul 29 '09 at 11:33
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up vote 2 down vote

Free tools:

Microsoft Word Tip: How to compare two documents for differences

The trial version of compare suite

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