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Comparing documents in Microsoft Word 2007 or 2010 shows inverted comparison


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Torsten Welk (341710) | asked Jan 14 '13, 6:13 a.m.
edited Mar 23 '14, 8:07 a.m. by Krzysztof Kaźmierczyk (7.5k480103)
Hi,

a customer has a problem.
They store word documents in RTC and use the default compare to get the differences.

Since we use Word 2007 or Word 2010 the order of the output of the differences has switched.
Added text of the new version is marked as deleted.

Any fix or workaround ?

Torsten Welk


Comments
Karl Weinert commented Jan 14 '13, 1:41 p.m.
JAZZ DEVELOPER

How are you comparing the files?
I think the MS Word compare tool is an eclipse feature.


Torsten Welk commented Jan 15 '13, 8:25 a.m. | edited Mar 23 '14, 7:40 a.m.

Hi Karl,

the collegues are comparing this in the normal way. "Compare with previous" or selecting 2 versions and then compare. They tried things in all directions. But the result is the same. The files are inverted. When I heard about this I supposed a swap in the parameter for the files.
I am not able to verify this. I am using MS Office 2003. There the compare creates the correct list of changes.

It would be possible that there is an option in MS Word to fix this problem. But we do not know which.
How is word started in the client after the compare ? Is the a parameter that work in a different way ? Or a combination of options ? Or is this the wrong way of thinking ?


Mark Wainwright commented Apr 30 '14, 10:55 a.m.

I can verify that this problem still exists for RTC 4.0.3 and Word 2010.

Newly added text appears in the Word Document Compare view as deleted text.  See below.

Inverted comparison for Word docs

Any update on how to fix or workaround this?

Thanks!
Mark


Nigel Bradley commented Apr 12, 5:38 a.m. | edited Apr 12, 5:43 a.m.

Has anyone found a good solution to this issue? It still occurs today and the only workaround I have found is to configure Eclipse to use a different external compare tool, but that is not ideal because the other compare tool only provides a text based compare of the word document text, not a word based compare.  The other option is to modify the settings in word to switch around the formatting of the compare, so effectively added content is formatted to look like deleted content and visa versa, but that is not ideal either and very counter-intuitive.  It seems as though when word is invoked by the compare capability in EWM, it is being passed the files in the wrong order, so the original/from version of the file is being passed as the new document and the new/to version of the file is being passed as the old document but there does not appear to be a way of configuring the inbuilt compare to reverse the order.  


It's interesting that from the comments, this only occurred with more recent versions of word and was ok with office 2003.

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