Comparing two documents - "Edit | Track Changes | Compare" does nothing :-(

[martinu]

LibreOffice Writer V7.6.6.3 Windows 10

Thread Compare two documents? refers to the Edit | Track Changes | Compare feature for comparing two documents. However it seems to do nothing! I may be using it wrongly.

I open doc1.odt then do Edit | Track Changes | Compare and highlight doc2.odt. Open.

Instead of displaying a merged document with changes highlighted as being doc1-only or doc2-only, I just see the original doc1 as if I had never tried to compare it with doc2.

https://help.libreoffice.org/7.6/en-GB/text/shared/01/02240000.html?&DbPAR=SHARED&System=WIN

talks about a Track Changes toolbar and a Compare button. Where is that toolbar and button to be found? I can’t see anything either on the toolbar or on the drop-down list of one of the menu-bar options.

I’m sure it’s user error - or rather, incomplete instructions leading to user ignorance!

I’m only looking to do a text comparison, not anything more detailed like comparison of paragraph/character attributes. The ablility to merge selected changes would be a bonus, but not is essential - I’m quite happy to copy/paste from one to another once I’ve found the changes.

Is it relevant that the two documents are password-protected? I am prompted to enter the password for both doc1 and for doc2, so the Compare Document option is getting as far as opening doc2 - but then nothing happens.

At present I have to save the two docs as text, then use WinDiff to compare them.

[fpy]

@martinu

Is it relevant that the two documents are password-protected?

could be indeed :

(Answered) Comparing password-protected documents does nothing

Turns out this an old bug and already had an issue opened for it, under the component Calc. The issue has been updated to address all LibreOffice files and two test Writer files added. If you have an account on the Issue Tracker system you can, if you so choose, add yourself to the CC field and get updates on any progress. Until then the only work around I can think of is to save each of the files to a new file without password protection turned on. The issue URL is: https://bugs.documentfo…

[martinu]

So it is related to password-protected documents…

As a test, I did what I should have done before flagging the issue - I saved my password-protected doc to an unprotected copy (doc1), made a trivial change and saved that it to a different unprotected copy (doc2).

Comparing doc1 and doc2 worked as expected.

The only difference from the older bugs that people have raised is that I don’t get an “incorrect password” error message when I give the correct password for the “compare with” document; instead, nothing happens at all.

Glad I’ve learned the solution: it’s no great hardship on the rare occasions that I want to compare password-protected docs, to have to save unprotected temporary copies of the two docs and to compare those instead.

Many thanks.