Compare Word Documents With Easy Referencing Between Two Files
MS Word provides many subtle yet important tools that can be used by more experienced users who know how to reduce their work load. One of these tools is the Compare and Merge Documents tool. This tool allows users to merge or compare word documents into one single document. The merge feature is regularly used in businesses and offices to merge two documents to form one official record but the compare tool is rarely used. The compare feature is mainly used in businesses when documents can be changed by anyone and if someone needs to cross check the updated document with the original document. The compare feature lays out each and every difference between the two documents, be it one word or 100.
The Merge and compare Document feature can be found in the Tools menu of MS Word. Once one has two documents one has to compare between, one can select the Compare and Merge Documents feature and then on select the Find Formatting option in the dialog box that appears after selecting the compare tool. To help with matters, when the tool is used, all differences to the text are shown as tracked changes. This means that every single change is shown in different colors and the change is shown inside a bubble box or a balloon next to it. This helps matters by showing where the change has been made and what the change is.
With the use of this tool, the original file is saved as a backup and every little change that a writer makes to the file is tracked, thus it is named as a tracked change. As a reviewer it is up to you to accept the changes and allow them in the document or to reject them and accept the original file instead. The compare feature as mentioned above is used in situations where people make changes to one central document and the reviewer needs to keep a tab on all the deviations made from the original copy.
While performing this feature, the existing document typed on the page is treated as the original copy and any change from then on is treated as a tracked change and displayed properly in the margin. Though many swear by this feature, there are people who find it easier and better to use external programs which can do the job like WinMerge. But even here there are problems as WinMerge can only work with ASCII files. To this end the file has to be saved in the format "Text file with Line Breaks", which can work with WinMerge. Apart from this there is another way of doing this entire thing easily. The easiest method is to invoke the CygWin command in the Command Prompt (UNIX ONLY) which calls the CATDOC function allowing the documents to be concatenated leaving out the changes as a separate entity. More information on CATDOC (stands for Concatenate Document) can be found on the website http://www.codejacked.com/comparing-two-versions-of-a-word-document/. So the next time you have to compare or merge two documents, I hope you take my tips and go in for any of these 3 specified methods!
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