If you are in a collaborative team of workers, or you are just dealing with various revisions of your own work, being able to track incremental changes is essential. And Microsoft Word, the ability to compare all the differences in two nearly identical documents is built into the Compare tool. Here's how to use it.
First, open word and any document file. (It may be one of the ones you are comparing, another document in its entirety or just a blank project). Click on the tab “Check” at the top of the screen to open the ribbon menu, then click the button “Compare”. will be near the right side of the menu.
Click on “Compare” again if another menu opens. After, in the new window, select your two documents: the "Original" document (previous one) and the document "Revised" (the later). If you don't see any in the dropdown menu, click the folder icon on the right to browse for the document using your file explorer.
On “Label changes with”, you can determine a note to help you keep track of which difference belongs to which document. Here I'm going to label mine as “later”, since it is the last revision of the manuscript. You can only add a tag to the revised document, but you can toggle between them with the double arrow icon.
Click the button “Plus” to view the advanced option. Most of them are self explanatory and all the alternatives are enabled by default. Note the option “Show changes in”, showing individual changes, either one character at the same time (very slow) or one word at the same time.
Click OK.” word will open a selection of complicated-looking panes in a single document. From left to right, has a detailed list of changes, a complete view of the document “Revised” with red marks on the left margin indicating changes and a double panel showing original and revised documents stacked. Scrolling with the mouse wheel, the three main panels will scroll at the same time, but you can use the scroll bars to the right of each to scroll the individual panels to each.
The Reviews panel is the most useful here. Show every change, what was removed and what was added, in order from the top of the document to the bottom. It's a great way to see differences in text and formatting at a glance. Clicking on any of the entries in the Reviews panel, the other panels will instantly move to the relevant position. Cleansed!
Once you have used the Revisions tab to find the specific revision, you can right click on the relevant text in the middle panel. Click on “To accept” O “To refuse” (followed by the respective action) to maintain or reverse the change, respectively.
You can save this compared document as a separate file which will not affect any of the documents you are viewing today. Just click File> Save As and save it like any other Word document.
Please note that the Compare function is not enabled if any of the documents are password protected or your changes are protected in Word. You can change these settings in individual documents by clicking Review> Track Changes.
