Large Document comparison problems

[Roscoe]

I am trying to compare two revisions of a document (manually revised in
separate documents, not using any of the built-in revision features).
Each is almost 200 pages long and contain several tables.

As you might guess, Word choked and hung before completing the
comparison. So I broke the files into managable "chunks".

Two problems I cannot escape however:

1) One paragragh caused a bizarre problem in that everything after it
was marked as deleted and replaced even though it appeared to be 99+%
common, thus burying the wheat deep in the chaff. If I manually made
the paragraph the same as the original, the delete/replace problem
would go away and following individual changes would be identifed as
designed. As I incrementally re-typed the changes and repeated the
comparison, it would eventually reach the point (and it didn't take
many changes) where Word would again gag and show the entire remaining
piece of the document as deleted and replaced. Finally I had to just
make the "chunk" break right after that paragragh rather than before to
get past that problem. However, any ideas as to workable solutions out
there and possible explanations for the problem?

2) The other problem is that the large tables produced the same issue
as above, but that wasn't a surprise and revisions in tables have
always been flaky. Anticipating that however, I saved the table
"chunks" as text files to remove all of the formatting issues and then
ran the compare. Did not go far into the document before it repeated
the same behavior described above. Again...ideas?

Thanks

Roscoe

 

[arcarius]

I am trying to compare two revisions of a document (manually revised in
separate documents, not using any of the built-in revision features).
Each is almost 200 pages long and contain several tables.

As you might guess, Word choked and hung before completing the
comparison. So I broke the files into managable "chunks".

Two problems I cannot escape however:

1) One paragragh caused a bizarre problem in that everything after it
was marked as deleted and replaced even though it appeared to be 99+%
common, thus burying the wheat deep in the chaff. If I manually made
the paragraph the same as the original, the delete/replace problem
would go away and following individual changes would be identifed as
designed. As I incrementally re-typed the changes and repeated the
comparison, it would eventually reach the point (and it didn't take
many changes) where Word would again gag and show the entire remaining
piece of the document as deleted and replaced. Finally I had to just
make the "chunk" break right after that paragragh rather than before to
get past that problem. However, any ideas as to workable solutions out
there and possible explanations for the problem?

2) The other problem is that the large tables produced the same issue
as above, but that wasn't a surprise and revisions in tables have
always been flaky. Anticipating that however, I saved the table
"chunks" as text files to remove all of the formatting issues and then
ran the compare. Did not go far into the document before it repeated
the same behavior described above. Again...ideas?

Thanks

Roscoe

Roscoe,

I don't know if this will help, but one of the major things that user of
Word always run into is lack of RAM for large projects. MS Word always
eat up a lot of RAM when it process any function. If you can turn off
some things that might be using up your RAM, you might be able to
recover some missing data in your document.

Arcarius76