Many a time, you edit an existing Microsoft Word document and save it as a different file. Sometimes, you may have several versions of a Word document stored in different files as a result of editing done on several occasions. If you’ve lost track as to which document contained what, which parts of the documents were edited, and how the new version is different from the earlier one, you can easily compare the two different versions of the same Word document automatically. Microsoft Word has a Compare and Merge Documents tool that makes it very easy to automatically compare two versions of the same document and allows even to merge them with the revisions / changes marked clearly in different font color and underlined / strikethrough font.
To compare two different versions of the same Word document, proceed as follows:
(1) Start Microsoft Word (this tutorial applies to Word 2002 / 2003; however, instructions given here will be applicable to other versions of Microsoft Word as well, with small variations).
(2) Open the newer version of the Word document that you want to compare.
(3) Click on Tools menu and then select the Options command. The Options dialog box will appear. Select the Security tab and make sure that the Store random number to improve merge accuracy check box is selected. Check / select this check box, if not selected already. This will ensure the best possible compare / merge results. Now, click OK to close the Options dialog box. See figure below:
(4) Click on Tools menu again, and this time, select the Compare and Merge Documents option from the menu (see figure below):
(5) A Compare and Merge Documents dialog box will appear on the screen. Now, from this dialog box, select the older version of the document that you want to compare. Click the arrow next to Merge at the bottom-right of the dialog box (see the figure below), and then do one of the following:
This will close this dialog box, and you’ll see the compare / merge results of the two versions of the document in the document chosen by you as above. If you’ve chosen the first option, the compare / merge results will be included in the older version of the document. If you selected the second option, then the newer version of the document will show the compare / merge results. And, if you’ve chosen the third option, the compare / merge results will be shown in a new document that will be created for this purpose.
The document that contains the compare / merge results will have revision marks in different font color (normally, red) to show the differences / changes made in the two versions of the document. Any new text added in the newer version will be shown in red color font with underlining; any text deleted from the older version will be shown in red color font with strikethrough effect. See, the following sample figure that illustrates how the changes made from one version to another will be displayed by the Compare Documents feature of Microsoft Word:
After comparing the two versions of the document, you can now easily decide which changes are to be kept and which are to be undone.
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