Weekly Computer Tip # 112
21 May 2005

Comparing two copies of a document (Microsoft Word)

A few days ago one of my clients sent me a revised copy of a Word document. But as he hadn't tracked the changes while editing, I found it really hard to spot the differences between this new copy and its previous version. So I used Word's built-in feature to compare the open document with the previous one, marking all the differences in the open document.

Here's how:

1. Open the copy of the file that contains the changes.
2. Choose the Tools, Track Changes, Compare Documents (Word 2000) or Tools, Compare and Merge Documents (Word 2002 onwards) command.
3. In the dialog box, locate and double-click the file you want to compare.

That's all. The first document will show the differences between the documents as "tracked changes", displaying deletions with strikethrough formatting and insertions as underlined text.

Until next week.

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