Office 2008 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

Comparing Documents

The merging process described earlier in this chapter works well if all documents have been edited using Word’s change-tracking feature. But often enough, you wind up with two drafts of a document, one of which has been edited (by you or somebody else). Word’s Compare Documents feature can help you see where edits have been made—a feature that has saved the bacon of more than one lawyer in back-and-forth contract negotiations.

To use it, round up both the edited version and your original or master copy and proceed as follows:

1. Open the changed copy of the document. Choose Tools → Track Changes → Compare Documents.

   Word opens the “Choose a File” dialog box. Here’s where you select the original document—the one you want to compare the edited version to. The original could be the one that’s never been edited, or one that’s been edited with change tracking, or even one that’s been merged. Just make sure that you’ve reviewed it and accepted or rejected all tracked changes before you begin the comparing process.

2. When you locate the original version of the document, double-click it.

   Word compares the two documents and creates a new document based on the second—a.k.a. original—document, with tracked changed inserted as if the first document were created by editing the second (original).

If there were already tracked changes in either of the documents, Word ignores them and gives priority to the actual, unmarked text. If either of the documents has untracked changes, Word asks ...