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Version control for MS Word (etc) documents?

I recently received this email (paraphrased), and didn’t have a good answer:

I work in the federal government, writing documents that are sometimes published in the Federal Register. I saw in the New York Times a reference [1] citing you as someone who would like to see the government use version control software.

Keeping track of the changes in my work is important. Currently, we use the “Track Changes” feature In Microsoft Word. But before working here, I worked in open source software projects, where we used CVS to track our changes. I thought it would be easy to use the same methods in government work, but I haven’t found software that does what CVS does except for Microsoft Word documents. Do you have any information about what software would be needed to track changes in Word?

Does anyone have any suggestions?