Diff fails for Word, Excel files

[suheil]

Hi
I am finding that Diff is failing for some files (MS Word, MS Excel,....). I get a message box with a long message that begins:

File has a NUL byte at offset 8; this is not valid for encoding 'Default Encoding'

I tried all possible encodings, and none of them works. Is there any way to get around this?

Thanks.

[Beth]

This is how DiffMerge should behave for binary files. This was added in the DiffMerge release 3.2.0 (May 2008).

We now detect binary files (files containing a NUL byte) and give a warning and stop. This keeps us from showing artificially truncated files in the windows.

From this forum post: Binary Documents

DiffMerge doesn't support binary documents, such as MS Word files. (They are binary even though you only see text when looking at the document in Word.) DiffMerge is a tool for comparing text files, such as source code.