Compare two documents for changes – Word and maybe Excel

Compare two documents for changes – Word and maybe Excel

by MF

If you use Word, I believe there is high chance that you send out a document to someone for comment, and you expect the receiver would know how to use  Track Changes in Word, which is a great function to highlight changes made to a document.

Unfortunately, not every one working in office really knows about MS OFFICE.  You may get a revised file with no hints on what has been revised.  So what do you do? Put the two document side by side and do eye-ball checking? LOL…   

 (Note: This is a template from Word, i.e. Office.com)

Don’t laugh as that is what I heard and saw.  It is doable if the document contains only few lines.  What if we are talking a doc with few pages and even more?

The Compare… command in Word  absolutely save your life.

The step is simple.

1) Go to Review Tab –> Compare –> Compare… 

2) Browse your Original file and Revised file (Meaning you have to save both files somewhere)

3) You may instruch how you want Word to display who made the changes:

4) Here you go!  12 revisions made in my example.  Please note that by default the compared document will be opened as a new document.

5) You may go through the changes one by one and decide whether to Accept or Reject the changes (by right click on the revision marked).

6) Can’t believe this is that simple

Well, since this is an Excel Blog, I am going to demonstrate a situation where we may use Word as a helper tool to compare two lists.

Scenario: We want to compare the two lists in Excel.  First thing in mind is to use logical operator, e.g. A2=B2 (if case sensitive is not an issue; otherwise use =EXACT(A2,B2) )

Problem: We can only identify where the content of two cells are different.  We do not see what the differences are in the cells easily.  Do you?

I believe there is no way in Excel can do that without VBA.  As I am not good in VBA at all, I try to do it in a non-VBA way, with the help of Word.

1) Copy the original list and revised list to Word as text, and save as, say, Document 1 and Document 2 respectively.(Note: They are actually two separate files: One contains original list; One contains revised list.)

2) Repeat the steps for comparing two documents as discussed above

3) Here we go… 8 revisions found with information on exactly what had been revised.

4) Accept it or Reject it.  Copy back to Excel if you need.

Yes, I agree that this is not perfect.  However this is what I can do without VBA and still get the job done quickly, especially when the list is a long one.

Nevertheless, if you want to stick to Excel, you are lucky enough because Chandoo wrote a post (Compare 2 sets of data by letter or word & highlight mismatches [vba]) to show you how to do so in Excel with VBA.

Final Note:

There is a built-in command in Excel called “Compare and Merge Workbooks” which is somehow similar to “Compare…” in Word.  However this function works for shared workbooks only, which I really don’t like it. So I am not going to talk about it here

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