Comparing Documents

[Guest]

I work in a law firm where we will email a document to a client for editing
and then need to compare it to our original document to track changes. I have
suggested to our lawyers that they use Word 2000's Compare Documents feature.
However, I need to know the following:

1. How reliable is the Compare Documents feature to catch ALL of the
deletions and/or insertions between two documents?

2. If there are tracked changes all ready in our original document and we
then compare the client's revised document with our original revised
document, all the deletions and/or insertions end up the same colour. I am
not able to get Word to identify authors with a different colour. Does
anybody know of any work around?

 

[Shauna Kelly]

Hi Christina

For my money, Word's compare documents feature is very useful for one-off
jobs where I need to identify differences between two documents. It may not
be up to professional use of the kind you are describing.

Word will certainly catch all the differences between two documents. The
problem is that it often identifies differences where none exists; or it
will identify whole slabs of text having changed, when in reality there was
only a minor change.

Only trial and error can tell you whether it will be suitable for your
office's needs. There are, however, several third-party add-ons for Word
available to manage comparing documents.

Hope this helps.

Shauna Kelly. Microsoft MVP.
http://www.shaunakelly.com/word

 

[Charles Kenyon]

I would recommend converting both documents to text files and then opening
one in Word and comparing it to the other. This will give you a clear
differentiation between the text of the two documents.
--
Charles Kenyon

Word New User FAQ & Web Directory: http://addbalance.com/word

Intermediate User's Guide to Microsoft Word (supplemented version of
Microsoft's Legal Users' Guide) http://addbalance.com/usersguide

See also the MVP FAQ: http://www.mvps.org/word which is awesome!
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