Thursday, January 31, 2008

Compare two OpenOffice Documents

I received some feedback on a document I wrote and I wanted to know what the changes were. In Word you can track the changes, but where is this functionality in OpenOffice? I looked around a bit and found this really nice feature I had been missing - it is the 'compare document' feature, and it allows you to accept changes on a per diff level. Simply open the original document and then under Edit, select the 'Compare Document...'



and browse to the edited version document. After that it will bring up a nice dialog box with all the diffs which you can accept or deny. I think it makes a lot of sense not to do this in the document itself like Word does.

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

you can also 'track changes' by using the Edit > Changes > Record or Show as needed. So you have all the options, nad more :-)

ert said...

Cool, this feature must have been added recently?

Moisès said...

Thanks Kurt for the quick tip

adszhu said...

Thanks - I just did not see this item in the menu :)

Vayira said...

The compare function doesn't seem to be very intelligent. It just crossed everything out & showed me the other document... there were only minor changes.

Thomas said...

Thanks for the hint

Worlds Hardest Game said...

This compare feature is not very bright and useful. I had to use WinMerge to compare the contents of two open office word documents. First I had to copy the text from docs to txt files, and then do a proper compare. Hope this helps.

Unknown said...

This was precisely what I was looking for with a calc document. Straightforward and to the point. Worked great. Thanks for the pointer!

Unknown said...

I have to correct original explanation!

You first open "last version" of a file- newest version of a file.
Then you can compare it to some "previous version" and it will open a dialog for accepting/rejecting changes.
At the end the last version of a file will be modified with all rejections you did. Therefore, if you accepted all modification you will end up again with the same unchanged last version. The file of a previous version in any case will not be changed!

Anonymous said...

Thank you my friend, excellent advice.

Igor said...

Great, thanks for posting this hint! Best