One feature we're particularly excited about in ExamDiff Pro 17 is richer support for displaying and comparing Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files.

In ExamDiff Pro 16 and below, the way that Office documents get handled is by pulling out all text from them wherever possible, but the structure and rich content within the documents gets lost. This makes it hard to compare, for example, Word documents or PowerPoint presentations that rely heavily on structured content like lists and tables, or Excel spreadsheets where the positioning of fields is important.

For ExamDiff Pro 17, we've completely rewritten the plugin the processes Office XML files (*.docx, *.xlsx, *.pptx, etc), to pull out as much structure and rich content from Office files as possible for comparison. This functionality will differ slightly between different document types, so let me go through then one at a time.

When comparing Word documents, ExamDiff Pro will now, in addition to the document text itself, display:

• table content, rendering it visually as a table in text form, with a box around each cell
• list content, rendering it neatly including nested lists
• metadata about hyperlink path and image content
• comments
• footnotes and endnotes
• metadata about rich content like diagrams, Word Art, and equations
• and many more other fields, when the /all option is specified (more on that below)

Below you can see a side-by-side of how a given Word document is rendered in ExamDiff Pro 16 vs ExamDiff Pro 17. As you can see, table content is now nicely presented, and metadata fields like hyperlink paths, image paths, comments, and footnotes are now displayed:

PowerPoint presentations are handled similarly to Word documents, with the addition of metadata about slides themselves (slide numbering and titles). This makes it easy to see at a glance which content corresponds to which slide in a presentation, as you can see in the side-by-side comparison below:

When comparing Excel spreadsheets, worksheet names are now displayed to make it clearer which rows belong to which worksheets, and cell formatting is now respected (so, for example, currency cells will now render currency amounts correctly and date cells will now render dates as they're meant to be shown). You can see how this makes it easier to view Excel files in the side-by-side comparison below:

As with prior versions of ExamDiff Pro, Office document handling is controlled by the built-in OOXML to Text plug-in, which can be configured in Options | Plug-ins:

Two command-line options for OOXML2Txt that are useful to know about are /all and /wrap:

• /all enables a bunch more document metadata handling that is normally disabled. When you enable /all, you'll see things like headers and footers, bookmarks, information about document properties, and lots of other fields for Office documents in ExamDiff Pro. We think that keeping this off would be more useful by default to most users, but try enabling it if, say, it's important for your use case to be able to compare things like header/footer content between documents.
• /wrap:N sets the word wrap character limit for the text output produced. (So for example, /wrap:80 forces 80-character lines - this is the default.) Note that wrapping is handled separately for each cell in a table. So if your word wrap limit is set to 80, this means that every cell in a table can be up to 80 characters wide (this caveat is important because otherwise it would be tough to render tables at all once they have more than a few columns). Also, list depth doesn't count towards the word wrap limit, so if you have a very nested list, each line will still be allowed its full length even if it's very indented due to list nesting.

ExamDiff Pro 17 will feature some significant improvements to how text files are displayed.

Switch to DirectWrite Text Rendering Engine

ExamDiff Pro 17 will introduce a new text rendering engine based on DirectWrite, Microsoft's modern text rendering API, replacing the older GDI-based text. (Note that DirectWrite is only available starting in Windows 7, so if you are one of our few users who happens to still running Vista or below, ExamDiff Pro will retain its old GDI-based text rendering engine in your case.)

Using DirectWrite will enable crisper-looking text (thanks to sub-pixel rendering and hardware-accelerated advanced anti-aliasing techniques), as well as higher-quality rendering of non-Western character sets, emojis, ligatures, and characters with complex diacritics. In the side-by-side example below, you can see how a variety of text styles end up looking nicer in ExamDiff Pro 17 versus previous version:

And if you happen to deal with emojis a lot, you'll certainly see a bit difference, as ExamDiff Pro 17 supports proper rendering of color and size for emojis:

Support for Text Styling in Syntax Highlighting

Also on the topic of text rendering, ExamDiff Pro 17 will introduce the ability to specify text styles (bold, italic, underline, and/or strike-through) for individual syntax types in syntax highlighting:

This can make it easier to visually navigate through source code files in ExamDiff Pro. For example, we can render keywords in bold and strings in underline:

ExamDiff Pro 17 will introduce the ability to manually specify the codepage (encoding) used for non-Unicode text files.

By default, when ExamDiff Pro loads an 8-bit-encoded (non-Unicode) text file, it interprets the file based on the system codepage, as determined by your default language setting in Windows. This usually does the right thing, but causes problems if you routinely have to deal with non-Unicode text files in different encodings. For example, here's what it looks like if you try to load some files in the Shift-JIS encoding (popular for Japanese scripts) while your Windows language is set to "English (U.S.)":

As you can see, there is some gibberish in the Added blocks here, where we would expect to see Japanese text.

ExamDiff Pro 17 introduces a solution to this issue: in Options under Text Comparison | Advanced, you now have the ability to override the codepage used for non-Unicode files, with the ability to choose any of the Windows codepages.

So we can set the Custom codepage to "932 (ANSI/OEM - Japanese Shift-JIS)":

And after re-comparing, the Japanese text in these files appears properly:

ExamDiff Pro 17 will add the ability to download and install updates without leaving the application.

In the past, the Help | Check for Updates command would require you to open a web browser to actually download a new version of ExamDiff Pro. Starting in ExamDiff Pro 17, when you click Help | Check for Updates, if there are any updates available, a new Update Available dialog will open:

From here, you'll be able to see all the features that have been added in between your current version of ExamDiff Pro and the newest available version, as well as seeing whether your license allows you to use this newer version or if you need to purchase an upgrade license.

When you click Upgrade, the new version gets downloaded and installed automatically. As part of the installation process, your currently open ExamDiff Pro window(s) will close, prompting you to save any unsaved file changes, if any.

As before, ExamDiff Pro will also periodically check for updates automatically on app startup, opening the Update Available dialog if an updated version is available. You can configure this automatic update-check behavior in Options under Global | Other.

We are pleased to announce that we've released ExamDiff Pro 16.

Here's what's new in this version:

• Ability to select from your 25 most recent Clipboard items for comparison
• New Document Types and Improved Syntax Highlighting
• Native support for ARM64
• Option to include line counts of added/deleted files in # of diffs in directory comparison
• Table comparison mode now invoked by default when clipboard contents representing tabular data (e.g. CSV, TSV) are compared (Master edition)
• Ability to uninstall previous versions during setup, as well as other improvements to the setup flow
• Option to consider files identical if their sizes match, even if their times differ
• The Sort plug-in is now case-sensitive unless the "Ignore case" option is set/li>
• Better performance of directory comparison
• Multiple bug fixes

You can find more details about ExamDiff Pro 16, as well as a download link, here, and the complete list of changes here.