skip to main content
10.1145/2723147.2723152acmotherconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesdocengConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Version-Aware Word Documents

Published: 16 September 2014 Publication History

Abstract

When complex or detailed documents are created, the creation process often involves work done by multiple people, and the document tends to reach certain milestone changes, or revisions. Maintaining different copies or editions of a document, or viewing how a document has changed over time, can be difficult to manage or use effectively using conventional software solutions. It would be useful to provide tools for teams to allow collaborative editing and implement features such as maintaining revision history, automatically merging changes from multiple authors, and visualizing document change history. While some word processors, including Microsoft Word, attempt to offer some revision functionality, their capability is often limited. We propose an extension to the popular Microsoft Word document format that provides these revision and collaboration features. Our current implementation comes in two pieces: a custom Word add-on for managing versions stored within a document, and a separate, Java-based application to merge distinct version-aware documents and their contents while retaining their independent version information. We have successfully made Word documents version-aware and able to be merged as a new revision.

References

[1]
Git. Git. http://git-scm.com. Accessed: 2015-02-03.
[2]
T. Lindholm. A three-way merge for xml documents. In Proceedings of the 2004 ACM Symposium on Document Engineering, DocEng '04, pages 1–10, New York, NY, USA, 2004. ACM.
[3]
Microsoft. Track changes. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word-help/track-changes-HA102840151.aspx. Accessed: 2014-08-17.
[4]
M. Pandey and E. V. Munson. Version aware libreoffice documents. In Proceedings of the 2013 ACM Symposium on Document Engineering, DocEng '13, pages 57–60, New York, NY, USA, 2013. ACM.
[5]
C. Thao and E. V. Munson. Using versioned tree data structure, change detection and node identity for three-way xml merging. In Proceedings of the 10th ACM Symposium on Document Engineering, DocEng '10, pages 77–86, New York, NY, USA, 2010. ACM.
[6]
C. Thao and E. V. Munson. Version-aware xml documents. In Proceedings of the 11th ACM Symposium on Document Engineering, DocEng '11, pages 97–100, New York, NY, USA, 2011. ACM.

Cited By

View all
  • (2022)Ransomware-Resilient Self-Healing XML DocumentsFuture Internet10.3390/fi1404011514:4(115)Online publication date: 7-Apr-2022
  • (2022)Towards Creative Version ControlProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35557566:CSCW2(1-25)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2022
  • (2019)Collaborative Practices with Structured DataProceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3290605.3300330(1-14)Online publication date: 2-May-2019
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences
DChanges '14: Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on (Document) Changes: modeling, detection, storage and visualization
September 2014
38 pages
ISBN:9781450329644
DOI:10.1145/2723147
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 16 September 2014

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. Microsoft Word documents
  2. Version control
  3. revision history

Qualifiers

  • Research-article
  • Research
  • Refereed limited

Conference

DChanges '14

Acceptance Rates

DChanges '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 7 of 9 submissions, 78%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 13 of 19 submissions, 68%

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)7
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
Reflects downloads up to 22 Jan 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2022)Ransomware-Resilient Self-Healing XML DocumentsFuture Internet10.3390/fi1404011514:4(115)Online publication date: 7-Apr-2022
  • (2022)Towards Creative Version ControlProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35557566:CSCW2(1-25)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2022
  • (2019)Collaborative Practices with Structured DataProceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3290605.3300330(1-14)Online publication date: 2-May-2019
  • (2017)Maintaining Integrity and Non-Repudiation in Secure Offline DocumentsProceedings of the 2017 ACM Symposium on Document Engineering10.1145/3103010.3121038(59-62)Online publication date: 31-Aug-2017
  • (2017)Improving Version-Aware Word DocumentsProceedings of the 2017 ACM Symposium on Document Engineering10.1145/3103010.3121027(129-132)Online publication date: 31-Aug-2017

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media