Comparing Office & PDF Documents
DeltaWalker Classic can extract and compare the text content of Microsoft Office, PDF, and RTF documents. When you load such files, either by drag and drop or with the path entry fields, DeltaWalker Classic strips away their formatting and works only with their text. This is almost always the kind of comparison you want when comparing documents.
DeltaWalker Classic can extract text from the following document formats:
- Microsoft Word 97 and later (.doc and .docx)
- Microsoft Excel 97 and later (.xls and .xlsx)
- Microsoft PowerPoint 97 and later (.ppt and .pptx)
- Portable Document Format (.pdf)
- Rich Text Format (.rtf)
HTML files (.htm and .html) are text files, so DeltaWalker Classic compares their source text directly, without extracting anything.
Text paragraphs in such documents are often long. In that case, you can either:
- Turn on Wrap long lines in Settings > Application > Appearance > Text Comparisons, or under Display in the settings panel of the text comparison window.
- Break long paragraphs at a given column when the documents are loaded: select When loading Office docs break lines at position in Settings > Application > Text Editing. This does not apply to PDF documents, whose extracted text already comes in lines.
Once extracted, the text cannot be saved back to its original file; however, you can easily save it as plain text with File > Save As….
Text from Word document tables is not extracted.