Show HN: Diffs of Word documents, designed for humans

I NEED THIS FOR EXCEL!

There's been a few discussions about Excel on HN recently and it's such a major tool in so many organizations and keeping track of changes is a nightmare.

Here's a classic example:

- Budgeting model for company with ~10 employees and 8 departments. Model has 30 or so sheets. Tracks all assumptions on the revenue and expense sides. Great model, built well, works excellently.

- CFO goes in and changes the conversion assumptions for the year.

- I go into the model after the CFO, notice that net income increased by $500,000 since the last time I looked at it. WHAT THE HELL CHANGED?

Now take this example and imagine you're on a late night call with the CEO, CFO, and CMO. Ideas and thoughts are going back and forth. "Hey, what does it do to revenue if we change assumption A from X to Y?" ... "OK, I like that. What about changing assumption B from W to Z?" ... "Nah, let's not do that."

At the end of the call I have our updated model that everyone is happy with... but I have no way to easily and reliably see exactly what was changed.

The only thing I currently do is setup a reconciliation sheets on the income statement. For each version of the model, I create a new sheet and copy/paste values from the income sheet then I can do a diff and see what numbers changed. This works well, but there's got to be a better way.

PLEASE FIX THIS.

Draftable for Word lives right in the Word ribbon, with native Word rendering of the documents. You get a side-by-side view of the documents with deleted and inserted text highlighted, and synchronised scrolling. By not having to switch programs, it doesn’t break up your workflow.

It also works great with Track Changes, and has a handy “Changes Since Opened” feature, which saves a snapshot every time you start working.

Thanks for the question, and we hope you give it a try!

*Disclaimer: I work on Draftable :)

Yep, this is the direction we're going in.

One person I talked to diffs two Excel spreadsheets by arranging the Windows to be same size and then rapidly pressing Alt-tab!

The latest versions of Excel (starting with 2010, I think) come with Track Changes: maybe that would help.

Thanks, you've picked an interesting niche.

Versioning text is an interesting subject, and there appear to be a bunch of tools that are teasing at the problem (many of which get discussed on the Versioned Writing google group), but none of them have really gotten things right yet.

A lot of folks have been taking Github as an inspiration, and it's been cool to see what people pick and choose out of the experience.