Frequently Asked Questions

Please see the Compatibility and System Requirements for this information.

Please see Feature Summary and Differences Between Editions for this information.

Araxis does not currently offer network (floating) licences or site licences for Merge, although we are aware of strong demand and will consider offering network licences in the future.

Please note that quantity discounts are available for the Professional Edition of Merge.

Please see the End-User Licence Agreement for Araxis Merge Software for full terms and conditions.

A licence must be purchased for each machine where the product is to be used. The only exception to this is that the primary user of a computer for which a licence has been purchased may make a second copy for his or her exclusive use on a second computer. This means that you can buy a single Merge licence and then use it simultaneously on both a Windows PC and a Mac, provided you are the only person using that licence.

Please see the End-User Licence Agreement for Araxis Merge Software for full terms and conditions.

Yes. See also ‘How many licences do I need to buy?’

Yes. Newly-purchased serial numbers will work with Merge v6.5 as well the current version of Merge.

Please see Understanding Araxis Merge Serial Numbers, Support Expiry and Upgrade/Support Entitlement Renewal and How to Buy Merge.

Yes. Please see the Merge for Mac OS X page on the Araxis website.

Unfortunately, no. However, Merge does seem to run under Wine  on Linux. We would be grateful for reports of any problems running Merge under Wine.

Another possibility is running Merge and Windows under Linux using a virtual machine environment such as VMware Workstation .

All versions of Merge v5.0 and later are Year 2000 compliant when run on certified Year 2000 compliant operating systems. Even if the version of the Araxis product you have is Year 2000 compliant, we recommend that you update to the latest version if you haven’t already. This will help you to avoid other potential issues and allow you to take advantage of new functionality.

You can find the version number of your copy of Merge in the title bar of the About box, available from the Help menu.

By stating that the above product is Year 2000 compliant, we mean that we have tested it to (i) verify correct operation with the current system date set after 1 Jan 2000; (ii) verify correct handling of files with timestamps later than 1 Jan 2000; (iii) verify that the year 2000 is correctly handled as a leap year.

Araxis Ltd has made every effort to ensure the accuracy of our product testing. However, because each customer’s environment is different from the Araxis test environment, it is the customer’s responsibility to validate the Year 2000 readiness of Araxis products in their own environment. Therefore, information about the Year 2000 status of Araxis products is provided "as is" without warranties of any kind and is subject to change without notice. Araxis makes no representation or warranty respecting the accuracy or reliability of information about non-Araxis products. Such information, if any, was provided by the manufacturers of those products and customers are urged to contact the manufacturer directly to verify Year 2000 readiness.

Araxis Ltd encourages customers to be fully aware of the potential impact that the Year 2000 could have on their business environment and their ability to compete in the 21st century. Araxis also encourages its customers to take responsibility for addressing needed changes as quickly as possible.

Araxis does not believe that Merge is affected by this change. Merge simply examines the timestamps of files as returned by the host operating system. Consequently, as long as the host operating system is behaving correctly with regard to the new DST dates, Merge should treat timestamps correctly.

Please note that the folder comparison functionality within Merge also supports optional timestamp tolerance, and the ability to make allowance for time-zone differences. See Additional Options for more information.

Please see Upgrading From an Older Version of Merge for information about this.

Click on the Re-Register... button in the File > About Araxis Merge… window (Help > About Araxis Merge… in the old-style interface) to re-enter registration information.

Please see Troubleshooting Installation for solutions to most installation problems.

The Help > About Araxis Merge... window displays the version and build number information.

Merge comes with filters for opening and comparing the text content of several popular file formats, including Word documents. See Comparing Text Files (or Typed/Pasted Text) for more details.

Alternatively, you can copy and paste any text from other applications into a Merge file comparison window. So, simply open a new two-way file comparison, then copy the text from one document (in Microsoft Word, press Ctrl+A to select the entire document, followed by Ctrl+C to copy it to the clipboard) and paste it into the left file pane (click in the pane, then press Ctrl+V to paste). Then, repeat, pasting the text of the second document revision that you wish to compare into the right file pane. The differences between the documents will then be shown. This is an effective way to compare, for example, different drafts of a contract being edited with Microsoft Word.

A further possibility for some application formats not supported by Merge (e.g. Microsoft PowerPoint .pptx files) is to open them in their native applications and save them to a different, supported format (e.g. .ppt).

Please see Integrating with Source Control, Configuration Management and Other Applications for the latest information.

If you are the developer of a vc or scm system, Araxis would be pleased to assist you integrate Merge with your product. Please email support@araxis.com for further information.

Please see Three-Way File Comparison and Merging and Automatic File Merging for this information.

It is sometimes useful to be able to review all the changes you have made before saving. If you have the Professional Edition of Merge, you can do this for two-way comparisons using the three-way comparison capability.

Open the file that you will be merging from into the left pane and the file that you will be merging into in both the middle and right panes. Whenever something is merged from the left file into the middle one, or if any other change is made to the middle file, the right pane shows exactly what the changes were. This enables you to review all the merges and changes you have made before saving.

Use the Visibility Filters... command on the View menu to choose exactly which files and folders you wish to see.

By default, pressing Tab on its own moves you between the various panes in Merge file comparison windows. Use Ctrl+T if you want to insert a tab character into the file you are editing.

You can change this behaviour on the File Comparisons -> Editing page of the Options window.

Merge provides the ability to create reports from file and folder comparisons. Please see Creating a File Comparison Report and Creating a Folder Comparison Report for more information.

Older versions of Merge

One way to create a permanent record of comparison results is to use the Merge printing capability in conjunction with Adobe Acrobat (see www.adobe.com ) to create a PDF file. Adobe Acrobat works by adding a virtual printer to your system. When you print your file or folder comparison to the Acrobat Distiller printer, a PDF file containing whatever you have printed is created.

Although you’d need to purchase Adobe Acrobat if you don’t already have it, this solution works well for audit situations, especially since the Acrobat Reader (needed to view PDF files) is free.

Yes. Merge contains a plugin that enables Merge to access files and folders located on an FTP server. Find out more.

• The small Previous Change and Next Change buttons below the scroll bars can be used to jump to the previous or next change.
• Click on the and toolbar buttons to move to the previous or next change.
• There are also several keyboard shortcuts that can be used.

Merge generally compares files very quickly. However, for those situations where comparisons take more time, applying the following suggestions can improve matters significantly.

• Turn off word-wrapping (Options... window > Text Comparisons > Display). This is likely to be the single biggest potential performance gain.
• Disable any unnecessary regular expressions (Options... window > Text Comparisons > Expressions).
• Disable any unnecessary column filters (Options... window > Text Comparisons > Column Filter).
• Enable the Show only # lines of context option (Options... window > File Comparisons). Note that this would only improve performance if you have left word wrapping on, but not otherwise.
• Turn off the detailed inline highlighting of changes (Options... window > Text Comparisons > Display).

Merge is optimized to compare even large folder hierarchies very quickly. However, folder comparison performance is highly dependent upon several Merge settings. For the fastest folder comparisons:

• Uncheck the Use filter programs in folder comparisons option (Options… window > Folder Comparisons).
• Uncheck the Gather line count statistics for inserted and removed files option (Options… window > Folder Comparisons).
• Uncheck the Scan contents of excluded folders and Scan contents of excluded files options (Options… window > Folder Comparisons).
• Choose the Check File timestamps and sizes comparison method (Options… window > Folder Comparisons).
• Check the Compare byte-by-byte for files larger than # KB option (Options… window > Folder Comparisons), and consider reducing the file size threshold for byte-by-byte comparison from the default 512 KB.

It is likely that some other application on your system has intercepted the F7 key for its own purposes. In particular, we have had reports of the nVidia Desktop Manager graphics card software using F7 as a shortcut key. It is often possible to disable such software’s shortcut keys, at which point they should become available for Merge to use.

Perforce changed the arguments that are passed to external tools that have the same names as their own tools. You can either rename our p4diff.exe and p4winmrg.exe tools and then update the Perforce options accordingly, or upgrade to a Merge build higher than 2187 which uses new names for the tools (araxisp4diff.exe and araxisp4winmrg.exe). The Perforce section of the scm Integration documentation has been updated to reflect these changes.

Merge enumerates Windows Explorer context menu plugins when you right-click within a file or folder comparison to bring up the context menu. Unfortunately, some third-party Windows Explorer plugins do not work properly in Merge and can cause the context menus not to appear, or sometimes even freeze Merge.

If you encounter this problem, uncheck the Include ‘Compare with Araxis Merge’ in Explorer menus option on the Options… > Application options page.

Please see Understanding Araxis Merge Serial Numbers, Support Expiry and Upgrade/Support Entitlement Renewal for information about your serial number.

If you run a web site, we encourage you to link to the Araxis web site. You don’t need to ask permission first, but we would appreciate a quick email to sales@araxis.com to tell us about your link.

To avoid any danger of broken links, it is best if you link to http://www.araxis.com/ or http://www.araxis.com/merge/.