The way we do the side by side analysis off line is use the "Grade offline in Excel" option at the team grading stage. This is quite good but it does need a bit of manual intervention to make the formatting look better, but I think it is a lot better than it used to be.
In terms of number of characters, that would be a nice feature as we run into the same issue as well. We have resorted to asking suppliers to limit the words in their answers but this is jsut an instruction rather than having any system control.