svn or mercurial version control of word documents

Question

As far as I know, Microsoft went to some sort of xml-based representation in their most recent version of office. If that\'s really true, then I would assume that version c

Answer 1

I'd put the Use Case in the foreground. Quite a lot of people in the world need tools to compare two versions of the same Word document - but they're not developers, but for example attorneys. At my law firm clients, documents go out to their clients and come back with edits, so a document-based-comparison is absolutely necessary. They use either the built-in Word comparison function, or third-party tools (WorkShare DeltaView is something like an industry standard). These tools allow also to compare PDF-documents.

The use case here is clearly content-driven: the attorneys need to get quickly an overview of the differences between two versions of a contract. Both versions can be stored in a document management system as "versions", or in the case of DeltaView, the delta file can be stored for further review.

What can be the use case for a developer? Source control systems mean "SOURCE" control, and not "control all stuff coming up in my project". I'd rather store project-related documents (Plans, Specs, Requirements, E-Mails) in another store, not in Mercurial. - On the other hand, I use often Word documents or Word templates as part of the solution in Document Template projects, and of course these documents are source - so saved in the repo. But the need to visualize differences was up to now relatively small, especially if your comments are good ("Version 1 - init", "Version 2: added textbox in header", "Version 3: added footer information" etc.).