How well does SVN work for Office 2007 documents?

Question

I'm considering using our SVN repository to manage all our documents. We mostly use Office 2007 (docx, xlsx) files. I thought the x was for xml but opening these files in notepad reveals a binary format.

I'm looking to find out what people's experience is with using svn to manage these kinds of files. Someone told me that SVN isn't so great for binary files.

Answer 1

They are xml, mostly, but they're in a zipped format. In other words, try renaming the file to .zip and check how it looks then.

And no, SVN won't work terribly well with that format. I mean, it will certainly be able to store them, but it won't be able to diff them, and parallel editing won't work either.

The real benefits of SVN is with parallel working on the files (ie. two people working on the same files at the same time) and merging the changes later. Binary files won't work with that.

Answer 2

Also see this question:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/538643/how-good-is-subversion-at-storing-lots-of-binary-files/538658

The short version is "not as well as it could", because while svn can easily diff or merge text, it can't do that for binary files. Office 2007 uses an Xml format that could act like text, except that it's wrapped in a zip file and svn won't know how to look inside the zip file.

Answer 3

TortoiseSVN is somewhat able to diff Office files -- it just calls into the file comparison features of Office.

Works OK for Word, so-so for Excel, and not at all for Powerpoint.

Answer 4

While I would always encourage the use of source control, Subversion being my source control of choice, and I think it will work, I don't think that is what you really need in this case.

Try looking into a document management system like: Share Point (what we are using), Knowledge Tree, OpenDocMan, etc.

Answer 5

Related posts:

• Similar question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/29810/is-version-control-ie-subversion-applicable-in-document-tracking
• Effectiveness of storing Office Documents under SVN: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1320654/will-subversion-efficiently-store-openxml-office-documents
• Using SVN as a backup only: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/538543/tips-for-using-cvs-or-subversion-as-a-backup-framework-for-office-documents

To summarize, storing your Office documents under SVN is a good idea, however, it demands a little extra work to be done in order to avoid problems. Such actions can be the following:

• Telling SVN that the file is binary: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/73797/how-do-i-tell-subversion-to-treat-a-file-as-a-binary-file
• Locking document files to prevent conflicts: http://svnbook.red-bean.com/nightly/en/svn.advanced.locking.html