Determining changes between two powerpoint files

[Guest]

I'm not the author of two differnet presentations but it is of upmost
importanance for me to know the differences between two different
presentations. Example I've received v1 of an education course, after a
period of time I receive v2 ot the same course. How do I compare the two
different version and determine what has changed. I need to know the changes
so I can change my presentation notes if necessary.

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

I'm not the author of two differnet presentations but it is of upmost
importanance for me to know the differences between two different
presentations. Example I've received v1 of an education course, after a
period of time I receive v2 ot the same course. How do I compare the two
different version and determine what has changed. I need to know the changes
so I can change my presentation notes if necessary.

There's no really accurate way of doing this. One old trick is to make
printouts of both, then line up the matching pages from each presentation and
hold them up to the light ... that can point out differences between them.

There are various bits of code that will extract the text from each
presentation to a file ... you could also use those. Extract the text then use
the FC utility from a command prompt to get a comparison of the results.

FC file1.txt file2.txt > file3.txt

File3.txt now contains the differences between the text in the two files.

See the PPT FAQ, http://www.pptfaq.com -- the VBA programming section -- for
several macros that'll extract text from PPT files.

Graphics, though ... a whole new ballgame.