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How to quickly compare two word documents and highlight the differences? 

Comparing two Word documents for differences may be a tedious job especially in two long documents, but, Word provides a powerful feature for us to finish this word quickly and easily. This article, I will introduce this useful function in Word.

Quickly compare two Word documents and highlight differences


Quickly compare two Word documents and highlight differences

If you are familiar with the Word application, the Compare feature in Word can do you a favor, please do with the following step by step:

1. Open a blank document, and then click Review > Compare > Compare, see screenshot:

doc compare two files 1

2. In the popped out Compare Documents dialog box, click doc compare two files 5 button to select the two Word documents that you want to compare from the Original document and Revised document separately, see screenshot:

doc compare two files 2

3. Then, click More button to expand this dialog, and in the expanded dialog box, specify the Comparison settings and Show changes as you need, see screenshot:

doc compare two files 3

4. After finishing the settings, click OK button.

5. Now, you can see a new Compared Document is created for showing and highlighting the differences between the two specific files, and in left pane, all revisions are list, as well the two specified documents are displayed in small panes in right part, see screenshot:

doc compare two files 4

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Comments (10)
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This comment was minimized by the moderator on the site
This information has really helped.
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Hi,
Thanks for your comment, glad this can help you! Have a good day!
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how do I highlight the changes to show the reader what has changed from the original document 
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Are you familiar with the highlight button?
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@colin -- by "the highlight button", do you mean the one to put a yellow highlighter background on selected text? That is not so useful here, this page is about Word's compare feature. I have the same problem as Dee. Word gives a list of changes on the left, and the previous and later document versions -- but for some changes it can be very hard to see where the difference is in the document. Subtle spelling errors can be hard to spot. Also changes in whitespace or font.

That's why it would be really nice to be able to highlight the changes to show the reader what has changed from the original document. Not for me to go in with a highlighter pen and mark them, but for Word's Compare feature to point out just where the change is.
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Yeah that's really a nice feature of word but I think it is paid. Actually I never checked this feature but after reading your article I tried to <a href="https://draftable.com/compare">compare documents</a> and it really works. Thanks for sharing an amazing tip regarding word.
This comment was minimized by the moderator on the site
Yeah that's really a nice feature of word but I think it is paid. Actually I never checked this feature but after reading your article I tried to <a href="https://draftable.com/compare">compare documents</a> and it really works. Thanks for sharing an amazing tip regarding word.
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Thanks for this. Very useful indeed
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can i be able to print or download the revisions for the word document after comparing the documents?
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It is much easier for me to compare text files and even folders using Code Compare. Devart is a really powerful tool.
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