Version-Aware Word Documents

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.