Patch Powerpoints?

[beeneeb]

Hey everyone,

I have a program that I built with Auto Play that has several Powerpoints presentations in it that are over 200MB each. Is there anyway to patch the "difference" between the Powerpoints, rather than having it replace the whole file? Here's an example:

Powerpoint #1 is 100MB
Powerpoint #1a is 105MB

If I create a "patch", the patch is 105 MB because it is replacing the previous version of the presentation. Is there any way for the software to create a true difference patch?

Thanks,

Brian

[Ted Sullivan]

Take a look at Visual Patch 3.0. It can make true binary differences.

http://www.indigorose.com/visual-patch/

[AXXESS]

Take a look at Visual Patch 3.0.

VP2 wouldn't do this....?

[Steven Carr]

The problem is not so much with visual patch but in the file format that power point uses.

If you create a basic presentation with a single page, save that, then add a trivial change and save as another name. Comparing these two files will show significant differences.

Given larger changes it is no wonder that a differencing/patching engine would trouble with these files.

However if you find (command line) patching tools that handle this case better then you can use those invisibly behind the scenes and as suggested give VP3 a go. If it make all the difference it would be worth the upgrade yes?

[Lorne]

(He didn't specify whether he was making a patch with VP2 or just a whole-file "patch" with autoplay.)

There were a couple improvements to the DeltaMAX patching engine between VP 2 and 3 that can result in smaller differences for some files, but nothing specifically targeted at powerpoint files.

If powerpoint files use compression, that can make them bad candidates for binary differencing, since the compression has the effect of hiding all the similarities between the files. You might be able to turn the compression off in powerpoint and see if that makes a difference.