If you’ve spent a lot of time creating and editing documents in the MS Word application, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of (and maybe even used) the DOCX comparison feature. This simple, manual comparison tool produces a three-pane view displaying the differences between two versions of a file. It’s a useful tool for summarizing the journey legal contracts (or other, similar documents that tend to start as templates) take when they undergo multiple rounds of collaborative edits.
As useful as manual DOCX document comparisons are, they’re still manual, which immediately makes them inefficient at scale. Thankfully, though, the open-source file structure DOCX is based on - OpenXML - is designed to facilitate the automation of manual processes like this by making Office document file structure easily accessible to programmers. With the right developer tools, you can make programmatic DOCX comparisons at scale in your own applications.