Linglom's blog

Introduction

Have you ever want to compare the difference of two text files? If the files aren’t too large, you can compare by open two file simulteneously and look the difference by your eyes. But what if both files contain many pages and lot of text, it would be painful if you do that way to compare files. If you have Microsoft Word, you can compare the difference of two documents with in few clicks!.

Requirement

• Microsoft Word 2000 or later.
• Two text files which can be open by Microsoft Word.

Step-by-step

1. In this example, I’ll compare two Word documents. I’ll use ‘RMSDataSheet.doc’ as a the first file. The second file, I edit the first file by delete some paragraph and move some paragraph and save as a new file ‘RMSDataSheet_2.doc’. This example is using Microsoft Word 2003.
   
2. Open the first file, ‘RMSDataSheet.doc’. Click Tools -> Compare and Merge Documents.
   
3. Browse to the second file, ‘RMSDataSheet_2.doc’. Click the downside-triangle icon on Merge button and select ‘Merge into new document’ to merge both files into a new document.
   
4. New document appears, you’ll see if there are any differences between two documents, the text will be shown in colorful and underline style. In this case, it is green text which is appears in first document but not in second document.
   
5. If there are some text which appears in second document but not first document, it’ll mark as ‘Deleted’ on the right side and dot line point to the location where the text appears in second document as in figure below.
   
6. You can accept or reject changes on each text by right click on the area and select ‘Accept Insertion’ or ‘Reject Insertion’.
   
7. Once you finished accept or reject insertion, you can save the document as new file.