"compare document" in NeoOffice (in Edit menu)

[yossiloss]

I have received a document from an editor and I want to compare it with the document I initially sent him so to review the changes he had made. When I used the "Compare Document" in the Edit menu of NeoOffice I got a file that begin with 21 pages of the first document and then 21 pages of the second document. This is not helpful. When I used PC I got a joint file that compares every sentence or every paragraph. What can I do to make the option usable?
Thanks
Yossi

[Turboladdade]

Very very few people use NeoOffice, so I'm afraid this question might never get answered directly. When you say "when I used PC" you must mean some other software application on Windows, because there is no NeoOffice for Windows. If you're looking for the exact functionality of your Windows software, you might want to look towards using the same software on the Mac, although that doesn't always guarantee the same results or even the best results.

The closest thing to what you're talking about that I know of is the compare feature of Microsoft Word. There doesn't appear to be a way to compare two documents in Apple Pages, which is unfortunate, and I have never noticed that wasn't there. I see on OpenOffice's wiki that software also has a compare documents feature:

Comparing documents

Sometimes reviewers may forget to record the changes they make. This is not a problem with Writer because you can find the changes if you compare documents.

In order to compare documents, you need to have the original document and the one that is edited. To compare them:

• Open the edited document.
• Select Edit > Compare Document.
• The Insert dialog box appears. Select the original document and click Insert.

Writer finds and marks the changes and displays the Accept or Reject Changes dialog box. From this point, you can go through and accept or reject changes procedure as described earlier.

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You can download OpenOffice for free, and also download a trial version of Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac. Maybe one of those solutions will be what you need.

[yossiloss]

Thanks.
In PC I meant Windows that is Microsoft Office in Windows.
The option you described in OpenOffice in MAC is what I used and gave the result I described which is not very useful. At least for my purposes.

[leonAzul]

May I suggest you try saving a copy of each version as plain text, and then using TextWrangler, a free text editor from Bare Bones Software, to do the comparison. With the two document windows open side by side in TextWrangler, go to the "Search" menu and select the "Compare Two Front Documents" command. A third window will appear at the bottom of the screen. Click on the disclosure triangles to reveal a list of every difference. As you click on each location in the list, the changed text is highlighted in the document windows.

[leonAzul]

FYI, Oracle is no longer supporting the development of OpenOffice.org. I just had a chance to download and test the compare command in LibreOffice, and it works more like what you expect, so using several programs at once shouldn't be needed after all. It is still a good trick to know if you need to filter out format differences from changes in text.

[Turboladdade]

FYI, Oracle is no longer supporting the development of OpenOffice.org.

I guess it shows how much I keep up with the current state of open-source productivity software.

[wove]

OpenOffice is still very much sponsered by Oracle, just visit OpenOffice.org. There was a lot of complaining within the community that Oracle was too controling and the project was forked. The new project is LibreOffice. Many Linux distros have embraced LibreOffice, but currently LibreOffice is missing many features of OpenOffice.

bill