Has this ever happened to you? You prepare a document in Microsoft Word and send it out for review, but when you get back the reviewed copies you find that one of the reviewers made changes without change-tracking turned on. So, how do you find out what changes were made? It turns out, there’s three ways to tackle this. (Another scenario is that you, yourself, create multiple versions of the same document over time, but then forget which is which. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve done that.)

The first method is to use Microsoft Word itself. It has a feature that allows you to compare two versions of the same document, and merge them into a third version. Whatever differences it finds between the first two become tracked changes in the third. At that point, you can review the changes to accept or reject them, just as if the reviewer had turned on track changes in the first place. Now, I must admit that I don’t personally use this feature very often. But, as I recall, it can be tricky to make sure that Word compares the files in the correct order. If you get it backwards, then additions show up as deletions and vice versa. (Note: My experience is based on Office 2000. The process may have improved since then.) In Office 2000, the instructions for doing this are under the heading of “Compare two copies of a document”. Paste that phrase into the “What would you like to do?” box in the help system, and it should come right up.

The second method is to use an external compare tool, such as WinMerge. (See our previous tips about downloading, installing and using WinMerge). WinMerge, like most third-party compare tools, can only work with ASCII files. So, before comparing to Word documents they both have to be converted to ASCII:

1. Open the first Word document (in Word).
2. Select File | Save-As (F12).
3. Change the Save as Type to “Text Only with Line Breaks (*.txt)”
4. Make sure that the filename is now different from the original. (This usually happens automatically, changing the extension from .doc to .txt)
5. Click OK
6. When Word warns you that you’ll be losing the formatting, click OK.
7. Repeat the above with a second file.
8. Now that you have ASCII text or versions of the two were documents, you can compare those with WinMerge, or another compare tool.

Yeah, yeah, I know! I hear the cynics in the audience groaning. But, bear with me for a minute.

What I just described is actually more work than the first method. Also, this method only works if all you are interested in finding are the differences in content, since the formatting will be completely lost, which is another downside. I readily admit that none of the methods described here are better than having change tracking turned on in the first place.

One situation where this second method turns out to be superior to the first is when a document is sent out to many different reviewers, each of whom only make a small number of changes. By converting each of the revised documents to ASCII, it becomes trivial to compare them against each other, mixing and matching. For example if two of the reviewers make virtually the same change, you could compare those two versions directly against each other in order to determine which version you like better. The downside is that accepting changes is no longer a matter of just clicking the Accept button in change-track-review-mode. You’ll have to copy and paste the changes back into the original Word document yourself. But again, in the case of there only being a handful of small changes scattered around, that may not be a big deal.

Tip #1: In the scenario described above, where there are multiple review copies to be assimilated, you could take advantage of WinMerge’s ability to quickly copy differences from one ASCII file to another. In that way, you’d create one “master” ASCII file that combines all of the changes from all the review copies. Having all the changes together in one place in one ASCII file might make it easier to then copy and paste the changes back into the Word document.

I promised you a third method. What if, in the second method, we could reduce the first six steps to a single step? Well, this is easily done if you have CygWin installed on your machine. (See our previous tips about installing and running CygWin.) CygWin comes with a variation of the UNIX CAT command, called CATDOC. (Cat is short for concatenate.) The regular CAT command takes the contents of one file and sends it to another, or sends it to the console, or whatever. (Invoking it consecutively 2 or more times is what makes the concatenation happen.) So, as you might imagine, CATDOC does the same thing, the difference being that whenever it sees that a source file is a Microsoft Word document, it automatically filters out all of the formatting, so that only plain ASCII is sent to the output.

catdoc review1.doc > review1.txt
catdoc -xw review1.doc > review1.txt

CATDOC has a number of optional commandline switches. The -w switch is the most interesting. That one determines whether or not paragraphs are broken into separate lines (i.e. word wrapped). The default is to wrap. Adding -w makes them unwrapped (each paragraph is one long line). In other words, specifying -w is the equivalent of using Save-As in Word with a file type of “Text Only”, and leaving out the -w is the equivalent of using Save-As in Word with a file type of “Text Only with Line Breaks”.

The -x switch tells CATDOC that whenever it encounters an unknown character it should render it using “\xNNN” notation. Otherwise, it will replace the unknown character with just a question mark (?).

Tip #2: The output from CATDOC (no -w) and the output from doing a Save-As in Word using “Text Only with Line Breaks” are close, but not identical. For one thing, they break at different line lengths. For another, Word will render paragraph numbers and bullets, while CATDOC does not. So, if you will be mixing and matching, then it would be better to be sure to specify -w when using CATDOC, and to specify “Text Only” when using Word Save-As, so, at least, the word-wrapping won’t be an issue.

Tip #3: Actually, this is just the “coming attractions” for another tip article. There is a way to automatically invoke CATDOC against all of the Word files in a given folder — to convert them all in one fell swoop — but that’ll be the subject of an entirely different article. So, be sure to set your aggregator to point to the CodeJacked RSS feed (http://www.codejacked.com/feed/), and keep your eyes peeled.

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