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Show HN: Diffs of Word documents, designed for humans

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Re: Show HN: Diffs of Word documents, designed for humans

#51

Post by Too »

aed wrote: post #11

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 ch…

Actually diffing in excel is quite easy to fix yourself with a macro. Google and you will find a few. It's maybe a screen's worth of code.

Essentially you just foreach sheet, foreach cell, if diff then highlight the cell. You are working with strictly defined data after all, not some hidden magic markup language like word-documents.

Re: Show HN: Diffs of Word documents, designed for humans

#52

Post by Too »

Pictures added or removed are not shown. Changed formatting is not shown. Text modified in text boxes is not shown.

Doesn't provide many more features than piping antiword to your favorite text-based diff-tool. Only difference i've managed to find is that with draftable you get formatted headers.

I'm also a bit confused, is the diff running on your server or on my computer? Your EULA keeps talking about "hosted services" but the only thing available on the website is this tool i install on my computer, no hosted services as far as i can see.

Re: Show HN: Diffs of Word documents, designed for humans

#53

Post by bentoner »

Too wrote: post #52

Pictures added or removed are not shown. Changed formatting is not shown. Text modified in text boxes is not shown. Doesn't provide many more features than piping antiword to your favorite text-based diff-tool. Only difference i've managed to find is that with draftable you get formatted headers. I'm also a bit confused, is the diff running on your server or on my computer? Your EULA keeps talking about "hosted servi…

I'm sorry to hear that you didn't find it useful. Thanks for trying it out though!

I'd like to understand better what you're looking for; my email's in my profile if you'd be willing to talk further.

If you're using the Word Add-In, the diff runs on your computer. If you're using the online demo on the bottom right of our homepage, it runs on our server. I'll make sure that we spell this out in our privacy policy.

The demo on our homepage is the only hosted service right now. The EULA includes "hosted services" partly to cover use of that tool but mainly because I didn't want to have to redo it once we launched more things.

By the way, did you try the Retroactive Track Changes features, which do compare all those things you mention?

Re: Show HN: Diffs of Word documents, designed for humans

#54

Post by jahagirdar »

IanChiles wrote: post #27
knowtheory wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you use LaTeX and Git - but mandate that each sentence gets its own individual line, it works quite well for versioning, even if its not transparent to the end user

There was a script for latex which took two versions of latex files and compiled them to a pdf with changebar's

Re: Show HN: Diffs of Word documents, designed for humans

#55

Post by ygra »

jahagirdar wrote: post #54
IanChiles wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you use LaTeX and Git - but mandate that each sentence gets its own individual line, it works quite well for versioning, even if its not transparent to the end user

There was a script for latex which took two versions of latex files and compiled them to a pdf with changebar's

Aptly named latexdiff: http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/support/latexdiff/

Oops, already mentioned below.

Re: Show HN: Diffs of Word documents, designed for humans

#56

Post by ygra »

Too wrote: post #51
aed wrote: post #11

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 ch…

Actually diffing in excel is quite easy to fix yourself with a macro. Google and you will find a few. It's maybe a screen's worth of code. Essentially you just foreach sheet, foreach cell, if diff then highlight the cell. You are working with strictly defined data after all, not some hidden magic markup language like word-documents.

That would be pretty poor for inserted rows or columns, right? (Essentially showing everything after that as changed)

Re: Show HN: Diffs of Word documents, designed for humans

#57

Post by ygra »

alok-g wrote: post #32
aed wrote: post #11

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 ch…

TortoiseSVN includes ability to show side-by-side comparison of Excel files.

This is done through a simple script that uses Excel to do so. Same for Word where it uses Word's native comparison feature.

Re: Show HN: Diffs of Word documents, designed for humans

#58

Post by ygra »

perlgeek wrote: post #20
markokocic wrote: post #3

How is this different from what "git --diff" provides out of the box for .docx documents?

I don't think git can show word documents. Sure, they might be XML under the hood, but getting a diff between blobs of XML isn't quite the same as a side-by-side comparison in a nice UI.

It's even a ZIP file with multiple files inside, only one of which is the actual document. So naïvely you'd just get back a binary diff. But I found some ways of crudely extracting text and feeding that to git for diffing so maybe those are already built-in in Windows versions. But that still just gives you a normal text diff and nowhere near as user-friendly as having something directly in the tool you're working in.

Re: Show HN: Diffs of Word documents, designed for humans

#59

Post by lucb1e »

bentoner wrote: post #10
lucb1e wrote: post #8

I could have used this in the past three months! I suppose after summer I might put it to use again during school. I haven't tried it yet, but the title sounds very promising. Nice work! PS. Heads up: Mind the guidelines: > "Don't abuse the text field in the submission form to add commentary to links. The text field is for starting discussions. If you're submitting a link, put it in the url field. If you want to add…

Oh, whoops; I won't do that again. It's the first time I've done a Show HN and we're still setting up our blog. I can't seem to edit it to change it into a link with URL.

Well I don't mind, in fact I personally disagree with this particular guideline. It was just a heads up :)

Re: Show HN: Diffs of Word documents, designed for humans

#60

Post by gadders »

One other use-case I could suggest: I once got caught in the middle of a contract negotiation between our in-house lawyers, and one at a service provider. This negotiation mostly consisted of sending back and forth Word documents with "Track Changes" turned on.
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