How to compare two word documents? [closed]

Question

Businesses Analyst from my team keeps sending us the updated Requirements documents often and I end up hunting the recent changes by comparing the old version. Is their a good way of comparing the Word documents?

Note: We have the track changes option ON, but now the documents looks like a blood bath, complicating it much more :(

Answer 1

The document comparison features in Word 2003 are extremely poor, and often results in the user removing parts of documents they did not want too

The only rational choice is to use other software. There are a multitude of text comparing software in the marketplace, but to do this within Word, the simplest answer is to upgrade to Word 2007 or later versions

From Word version 2007 the ribbon command "Review" and "Compare" are easy to find, and operate reasonably obviously. And they have a nice clear layout of merged changes, and the before and after docs

The small cost of the upgrade will be well worth considering the time you will waste in 2003 compare, and the potential damage to your documents it could cause

Any suggestions by others that you can use the compare features in 2003 is mischievous, and has not well thought through given the long term consequences of parts of your documents being silently deleted

Answer 2

Use this option in Word 2003:

Tools | Compare and Merge Documents

Or this in Word 2007:

Review | Compare

It prompts you for a file with which to compare the file you're editing.

Answer 3

I use TortoiseMerge with the xdocdiff plugin to compare Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF versioned files

Answer 4

If you have Beyond Compare, you can diff two word documents with the help of some rules that you have to download from the developer's site and plugin. It'll then give you a text-only (without formatting) view (with some word format-gibberish that you can ignore. The differences will be highlighted and easy to find.

I made a note on how to do it here. It talks about Excel but there is a rule for Word in the same place.

If you don't have Beyond Compare... buy it! Highly recommended.. I'd struggle without it.

Answer 5

Codejacked covers three different methods on how to compare word documents.

Answer 6

You're using the wrong tools. Through the course of my last major project, we managed to convince the entire team to move to a Wiki scheme. Not only did it make tracking changes faster and easier, but it helped organize the information better. Rather than having to keep track of arbitrary indexes in a large text document, hyperlinks were available between documents.

This meant that the documents could naturally flow from high-level to specifics. Implementation of such specs was incredibly easy in comparison to Word docs. Also, the fact that the docs were in a central location ensured that no one was still working from an out of date copy they saved to their hard drive.

I know there can be some internal resistance to moving in new directions. But if you can convince your colleagues that they should be forward thinking and always challenging themselves, they'll give it a shot and become true believers in no time flat. :-)

Answer 7

Near the "track changes" stuff there is also an option to compare documents, I believe.

Answer 8

Attorneys use programs such as Comparewrite and DeltaView as we are comparing documents daily. We call it "blacklining" a document because the differences show up in bold underline for additions and black strike-through for deletions.

Answer 9

Open any of the documents and use the Review>Compare tab.

Answer 10

I don't know how to compare the files individually, since they are binary, but how about making a program that talks to MS Word, copying the contents of the files to a pure-text file? Then you could compare the plain-text files.

Answer 11

If the formatting is basic, one option is to use a tool that dumps the doc to a plain text file, and then use diff as you would on any other.

Answer 12

Versionate might do the trick.