Many working film and TV writers use Word for scripts. Our hard drives are
often cluttered with hundreds of drafts of dozens of projects, often
spuriously named or renamed - by ourselves, or by others who've read and
returned the scripts. A handy software feature would be a Word equivalent of
the old DOS command COMPA it would take the names of two Word docs
("CatMovieFirst Draft" and "CatMovie.1") and output a third draft with all
deviations from Draft A contained in Draft B marked somehow. This would be
the equivalent of a Script Assistant's asterisked rewrite draft. I often
have two or more seemingly identical but differently-named drafts of a
100-page script and the only way of knowing if I made a crucial change in one
of them (say, one line of dialogue, maybe a year ago) is to go through them
both, side by side, and read every line. A COMPARE feature would output a
new draft with just that one line boldfaced or asterisked. A real hard-drive
cleaner-upper...

----------------
This post is a suggestion for Microsoft, and Microsoft responds to the
suggestions with the most votes. To vote for this suggestion, click the "I
Agree" button in the message pane. If you do not see the button, follow this
link to open the suggestion in the Microsoft Web-based Newsreader and then
click "I Agree" in the message pane.

http://www.microsoft.com/office/comm...ocmanagemen t

In Word, if you click on Help and search for "compare document",
you would find that the handy feature you request already exists
in Word. See
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/as...889391033.aspx
for information about how to use the Compare feature in Word 2003.

Andrew J. wrote:
Many working film and TV writers use Word for scripts. Our hard drives are
often cluttered with hundreds of drafts of dozens of projects, often
spuriously named or renamed - by ourselves, or by others who've read and
returned the scripts. A handy software feature would be a Word equivalent of
the old DOS command COMPA it would take the names of two Word docs
("CatMovieFirst Draft" and "CatMovie.1") and output a third draft with all
deviations from Draft A contained in Draft B marked somehow. This would be
the equivalent of a Script Assistant's asterisked rewrite draft. I often
have two or more seemingly identical but differently-named drafts of a
100-page script and the only way of knowing if I made a crucial change in one
of them (say, one line of dialogue, maybe a year ago) is to go through them
both, side by side, and read every line. A COMPARE feature would output a
new draft with just that one line boldfaced or asterisked. A real hard-drive
cleaner-upper...

----------------
This post is a suggestion for Microsoft, and Microsoft responds to the
suggestions with the most votes. To vote for this suggestion, click the "I
Agree" button in the message pane. If you do not see the button, follow this
link to open the suggestion in the Microsoft Web-based Newsreader and then
click "I Agree" in the message pane.

http://www.microsoft.com/office/comm...ocmanagemen t