Compare and Combine Documents In Word 2007

Many finished documents, books and magazines are examples of team efforts where people work together to create some polished product. There are times when you involved with a single document that was created and modified by some others from your group. Such team work can be easily handled by using comparison tools available in Microsoft Word 2007.

Compare and Combine documents

Compare and Combine options provides you a way to differentiate two documents to review changes such as formatting and white spacing along with word level or character level changes. This option can be useful situations where you need to expedite a review process by giving separate copies of original document to reviewers. Upon return of documents by reviewers, you can combine the changes into a new document or just compare two versions of a document to look at the differences.

Tip- If you’ve document with tracked changes but not the original document, then make a copy of document with tracked changes and reject all changes. It will create an original copy of document that you can use either compare or combine features.

Although Compare and Combine look similar features, there is a difference between them. Compare is generally used to comparing the differences between two documents, and Combine is used to compare two or more documents as well as to identify who changed what in the document.

You can specify the types of changes you want to compare like formatting, white spaces, and word or character level changes. The Compare and Combine features can be found under Review tab in the Compare group.

Compare two versions of document

Compare simply compares two documents. Additionally, all revisions in document are attributed to a single author. Follow these steps, to compare two versions of one document:

• Open Review tab, click Compare, and then from list, click Compare. It will open Compare Documents dialog box.
• In the Original document area select/browse the original document.
• In the Revised document area select/browse the original document.
• Click More to show the advanced options for Compare Documents.

Compare Documents in Words 2007

• Click OK. The original and revised documents will remain unaltered and a new Compared Document is created.
• To view all three versions of the document at once, click Show Source Documents on the Review tab, and then click Show Both. This will enable you to view tri-pane review panel containing original, revised and compared document.

Resulting window with Compared Document

The new Compared document displays the changed text in an unnamed document file. You need to save and name the file if you want to store it for future use.

Combine documents from multiple authors

Using this feature you can combine or merge two or more documents. Word will keep all modifications as tracked changes, made to original and revised documents. All authors are identified and their revisions are combined into one document. Follow these steps to use Combine features:

• Open Review tab, click Compare, and then from list, click Combine. It will open Combine Documents dialog box.
• In the Original document area select/browse the original document.
• In the Revised document area select/browse the original document. The following image shows the combination of two sample documents as a Combined Document.

Resulting window of Combined Document

To combine the additional documents, combine the resulting Combined Document with another revised document.