We’ve all been there – you’ve asked your boss or co-worker to review a document, presentation, or even a CAD drawing. They’ve spent time diligently reviewing, adding comments, adding value and changing copy or images. But when you get it back, it’s almost impossible to tell exactly what changes have been made!
Maybe the reviewer was thoughtful enough to enable track changes (in the case of an MS Word document). But the file you get back might not have that sort of feature enabled – or the edited file might even be a different file type because the reviewer prefers a different document editor.
You could also end up with more than one version of a document. Having to manually go through two documents side-by-side and figure out the difference can be tedious, especially when there are only a small number of minor differences. Wouldn’t it be great if there was an easy way to identify the differences between two documents or slide decks, even if the two files were different file types?
Side by side comparison
OpenText™ Brava!™ has a powerful set of Document Compare features that are easy to use and show you both textual and graphical differences. Let’s say you send your boss a PowerPoint file for review and he returns back his updated version of the file. You could try to use PowerPoint’s Review Compare feature to help identify what slides are different. But you’ll still have to look at the two conflicting slides and figure out what’s different in the text bullets. Brava! Document Compare will not only identify the different pages, but it’ll also highlight any added, changed, or deleted text on each slide.
As you can see in the screen image above, Brava! Document Compare highlights the text deletes, changes and adds using red, yellow and green by default. Want a different color scheme? You can customize it. By clicking on a piece of the highlighted text in the top compare panel, Brava! will navigate to the specific location on the specific page in the lower panel. You can switch from the text compare to a side-by-side view, or toggle from one document to the other.
Graphic overlay
For spotting graphical differences, you can use the graphic overlay view and use the slider control to fade from one doc to the other. The screenshot below shows how an image that was replaced on one slide is fading from the old slide to the new, replaced image.
Brava! Document Compare can not only help identify the differences between two slide decks, but it can also review two different versions of CAD drawings with a special graphical compare mode for CAD drawing files. Brava! can be used to compare virtually any type of content file regardless of the file format extension. As an added bonus, when comparing two documents you can generate a summary report of the textual differences and save the report for future reference.
Comparing documents is just one of the many useful collaboration functions provided by OpenText Brava!, whether using the desktop version or the server-based version. Learn more about the range of features and benefits of Brava!.
