The other day, I sent someone a Word document for them to read and provide edits and comments. Can you believe that they made the edits without using Track Changes or highlighting them at all. They didn't even do the typical trick of yellow background or red font. Their changes just blended into the text.
I didn't have time to read them both side by side, manually scanning for the changes. Even worse, if I did that, I might have missed a significant change. I needed a tool that would compare these two files and show me where the differences were.
Craig from codejacked described the available solutions for Word 2003 and earlier. CharlesJBarry, a commenter on Gina Trapani of lifehacker's post on this topic, explained that Word 2007 included a compare feature.
After looking around, I found these options for comparing the differences between Word documents:
- Microsoft Word 2007's Compare feature (free if you own Word 2007)
- Using a tool made for comparing the differences between text documents (free to $30)
- Commercial Option #1: WorkShare Professional ($349)
- Commercial Option #2: SoftInterface DiffDoc ($199 to $399)
Microsoft Word 2007
After comparing a few third party tools for comparing Word documents, I decided it was simpler to use the functionality that came with Microsoft Word 2007. Word has a new feature called Compare that does exactly what I wanted. It is on the Review tab, in the Compare section. This tool doesn't have the best usability; I had a hard time keeping the panels lined up evenly. This made it a little harder to locate the changes in each document. This tool is great because it does work and it is included in Word... meaning it is free if you already own Word 2007. The button to start doing a comparison looks like this:
Below is a screenshot of the Compare feature in action. It showed the two documents side by side, the "Compared Document" and the "Original Document". Notice how Word only highlights the change in the "Compared Document." For each difference, you can decide to keep the content from the Compared or the Original version. Underneath the "Original Document," it also showed a new "Revised Document." The Revised version shows what your document would look like after merging the differences between the documents. It gives a helpful summary/details panel on the left.
Next is a screenshot that better showed the summary & details panel. This panel lists all the differences (changes) between the two documents. The changes identified in the details section are clickable and will scroll the documents to the specific change.
Word also gave me options for choosing to see one document at a time or both at once, as seen in the Show Source Documents menu.
I also tried using this feature where one of the files had track changes turned on. Before opening the comparison, Word confirmed with me that I really wanted to continue. Word prompted me, "One or both of the compared documents contain tracked changes. For the purpose of the comparison, Word will consider these changes to have been accepted. Continue with the comparison?"
Using a program made for comparing plain text files
There are several good programs for comparing the differences between files. Some of the best I've reviewed are WinMerge (free), Beyond Compare ($30), and KDiff3 (free). One problem with using these tools is that they don't understand Microsoft Word's proprietary formatting codes. They show those formatting codes as garbage characters. For example, here is a screenshot from WinMerge that shows the "garbage characters". Though it did a great job of comparing the differences in the text of two Word documents, it was unnerving to see that it also identified differences in the proprietary formatting code. It made me wonder if there was something really important in those differences that I was missing.
There are two ways to get around this. The first is to save your Word .DOC files as plain text (.TXT). Then compare the plain text files.
The second is to use a plugin. I tried the xdocdiff plugin for WinMerge. This plugin advertises that it will convert the Word .DOC files to text while WinMerge is comparing them. When I used it, it did not make permanent changes to the original Word files were not changed. This tool was nice because it only showed my text content from Word 2003 and older documents (.DOC). Even though it advertised to work on Word 2007 files, I could not use it to compare ".DOCX" files. Also advertises to work with RTF, XLS, PDF, and many other file types. There are similar VBScript "rules" plugins for Beyond Compare.
From the reviews I've seen, it appears that WorkShare Professional is the best product on the marketplace today. It used to be called DeltaView. However, it costs $349. That's a lot more than free! I've heard that the commercial comparison programs are priced so high because many legal offices use them (and can afford those prices).
If you don't want to register on the WorkShare website just to view their demo, you can view screenshots of the application at softlinx and officeinfo.
SoftInterface is a company that specializes in making conversion software. Their DiffDoc product will allow you to compare the differences between two Word .DOC files. The Standard version costs $199 and the Professional version costs $399. The product worked well when comparing Word 2003 (.DOC) and Word 2007 (.DOCX) files. The interface was a little awkward, but it did support reviewing the differences between two formatted Word documents. It highlights the differences with black highlighter on both sides and the bottom pane combines the two documents, using "track changes" style to highlight the differences.
Another drawback was that DiffDoc did not catch formatting differences, as seen in this screenshot.
Conclusion
There are several options at several price ranges for tools that can be used to compare the differences between two Microsoft Word documents. Which option is right for you depends on your preferences and your budget. WorkShare Professional looks like it is probably the best tool, but is much more expensive than the alternatives. As for me, I'll be using Word 2007's new Compare feature or a plugin for a text-based tool. I'm interested in hearing from you about your experience with these tools and others like them, especially about WorkShare's tools.