Very often, file comparison is more than just review of differences and similarities. Proper comparison of documents is about full contrast of the two files, analysis of changes, comparison of individual abstracts and a lot more. Of course, comparison of small files should not become a major problem.
Compare individual files with Compare Suite
Bigger and more important files require proper attention. For example, when comparing application source codes all differences should be found, especially if location of these differences will lead to effective debugging (for example, comparison of two software versions). The same concerns business and legal documents. Sometimes sales managers need to contrast lots of price list versions or other relevant business docs.
As to legal contracts, even the slightest changes may result in huge problem. That is why no mistakes in comparison job are tolerated. Compare Suite makes none of them. This powerful file compare engine developed by AKS Labs is very good at file and folder comparison job. At the same time, this software has a number of additional features that complement comparison process. Let’s review a few of them.
Compare individual files and approve changes
To compare individual files it is necessary to run Compare Suite in a file comparison mode (the first icon from the left under menus). Then users have to choose the path to files that need to be compared. These can be files located in PC or a remote server (in this case users might need details to access ftp servers). As soon as the two files are selected the comparison process begins (it may take different time which depends on file size).
Depending on the files, users can choose between 3 comparison modes. Almost identical or very much alike files will require a char by char comparison. It means that all different chars (symbols) will be highlighted. This method works well if users are interested even in minor changes, for example plurals of words, commas, possessive cases etc. If compared documents do not have much in common it is better to use either word by word (docs with 60-80% of similarity) or comparison by keyword (less than 40% of similarity). Each method works greatly for relevant file types.
Very often, users are not interested in such changes as case or trailing spaces. It is possible to disable them thus excluding from the comparison process. Indeed, why highlight such insignificant changes? To the contrary, there may be words of special interest as well as words to be ignored that can be specified in CS.
What files types does Compare Suite support? These are most widely used file extensions like MS Office, Open Office, picture files, PDF documents, HTML pages and a lot more (in fact there are over a dozen of converters in Compare Suite). It is important to check whether or not the relevant converter is on before comparing files.
Lastly, CS features commenting and reporting functions that are extremely useful in teamwork. Comments help communicate with colleagues while reports contain important info on compared files and folders. Reports may have different formats and contents.