How to compare two visio files and report difference between them?

Question

Now there are 2 visio files, a new one and an old one.

Some changes are made in the new one.

I need to compare the two files to find out differences between them.

how to make it done? Is there any tools to do this work? Thank you all!

Stelmach

Is the visio file format plain-text enough that you can just use diff to find the differences? – Agriculture

If you save your Visio files in the VDX format, then text-based diff utilities may prove more useful. VSD files are binary and not easily diffable. Can you elaborate on the kind of differences you want to detect? Depending on that answer, it may be possible to perform more specific difference detection that would be useful for you. – Ariella

Answer 1

Another good way is on this page.
It involves doing a text compare on the properties of each object (location, size, etc.). Those properties can be exported using the Print ShapeSheet function on the Developer tab (Visio 2010+).

Exsanguinate

Answer 2

You could write something using office interop that reads the files and goes through the sheets/shapes etc in each one and compares them. Fairly easy to do, quite boring but you can make it look for exactly what you need.

You could save them as XML or HTML and compare the files.

You could use google to search for Visio Diff Tools

Zantos

Answer 3

For newer formats (*.vsdx), I was able to compare using a file archiver (e.g. 7zip) and a text-based diff tool (e.g. WinMerge).

Steps:

1. Using the archiver tool, extract OldFile.vsdx and NewFile.vsdx to separate folders.
2. Using the diff tool, compare the two folders.

The diagram differences are found in the folder extractedFolder\visio\pages\ and there should be XML files per page.

Optional:
To clearly see the differences, you can format both (old and new) XML files (e.g. using Notepad++ XML formatter), and then compare the formatted files in the diff tool.

Bertero

This worked for me with Microsoft Visio Plan 2 (M365) today for a Data Model Diagram/ERD. – Zeniazenith