Version Control for word documents

Question

How would people recommend doing version control for word documents? Is the in build control up to the job or is it better to rely on dedicated version control systems, and if so, which ones?

Answer 1

You could use something like subversion, but it is going to upload a whole new copy of the document, instead of a changeset.

Sharepoint has some versioning for office documents, but I haven't tried it yet (or checked what it is storing).

Answer 2

Subversion has built in support for word documents so it's a pretty decent solution, but you might want to look into a proper document repository like the one built into sharepoint 07. The advantage is that it allows proper access control, versioning and rollback as well as being able to link to it from websites.

If you want to do serious versioning then no, I don't think the inbuilt controls will be up to the task, particularly if you want to share the documents with others.

Answer 3

@lomaxx:

Subversion has built in support for word documents

More specifically, TortoiseSVN does. If you use the TortoiseSVN context menu in explorer to, e.g., bring up a diff, Tortoise will call a script that uses Word's built-in comparison feature to do the actual diff'ing.

Answer 4

SharePoint is definitely the way to document version control in the enterprise.

Answer 5

G'day,

This was discussed previously on SO with some really good resources mentioned in the responses.

cheers,

Rob

Answer 6

You could use something like subversion, but it is going to upload a whole new copy of the document, instead of a changeset.

I was under the impression SVN stored byte-level diffs, which makes it possible for it to store incremental changes to binary files such as Word docs and pictures, as well as text files. How to meaningfully represent those changes in a diff is another question, but underneath the hood I think SVN stores changesets for binaries.

Answer 7

Try MagnetSVN. It is Microsoft Office Subversion integration that we've built specially for such cases as yours.
Subversion is a reliable source control and it handles word documents well enough:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/538643/how-good-is-subversion-at-storing-lots-of-binary-files/538658