Extracting comments from a Word 2007 docx document
luke — Wed, 04/08/2009 - 10:28
I hope to improve this in the future into a utility of some sort, but for now here is the xslt to get inline comments out of the comments.xml file:
http://snipplr.com/view/14782/extract-inline-comments-from-a-word-2007-d...
1. Rename your .docx file to .zip
2. Extract the .zip file and grab comments.xml from the word folder
3. Use a program like Xselerator to apply this xslt to comments.xml
The impetus for this is that Word is my (and I'm assuming many others as well) organization's de facto standard for documentation. Again like many organizations we are required to track document review history (and it is a good practice in general, like tagging your commits) and often reviews are performed by marking up an original document with in-line word comments. Unfortunately it is tricky to browse old reviews when they are hidden in the middle of a 100 page document, so it would be nice to extract them automatically and view the entire review history on a particular document to get a better idea what happened to it over time.
What I really want is a user friendly (Sharepoint FAIL), braindead simple (Sharepoint FAIL) version control system for documentation that integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Word (Sharepoint kinda sorta tried to do this but FAILED), so why don't you build it for me? I'm sure it will make you tons of money.
