Beyond Compare

Do you ever send a document to somebody with Tracking turned on, and then it arrives back, fully edited, with Tracking turned off? And, there’s no sign of Tracking having been anything other than off during its vacation from you? So, you can’t tell what editing has been done.

Don’t you hate when that happens?

Or… when you send a document out to your boss, and then your boss sends it to his or her boss, who sends it to a dozen other people, and eventually, a dozen different variations of the document you sent out arrive in your mailbox. And, all of them have been changed—some in very subtle ways—some with tracking turned on, some with tracking turned off, and still others who couldn’t decide which way to edit it, so they did a little bit with tracking turned on and off.

Ready to scream?

Double Your Pleasure

Well, while Word can’t perform the needed frontal lobotomy on such abysmal Word users, it can help. But, first, you need to understand Compare and Merge.

For purposes of this article, I used Word 2003 (a.k.a. Word 11). However, as far as I can determine, this feature works similarly in Word 2002.

Compare and Merge are two <click> two <click> two tools in one! Okay. Anyone old enough to remember the commercial I’m making fun of? Hint: Doublemint chewing gum.

Compare and Merge can compare two documents that contain no tracking, and insert tracking into one of them so it looks the way it would’ve looked had it been edited with tracking turned on. We might call this tracking-after-the-fact.

Compare and Merge can also merge two documents that do contain tracking. In this case, the additions and deletions are consolidated into a single document.

Comparing Unmarked Documents

To compare two unmarked documents, open one of them. From the menu, choose Tools/Compare and Merge, navigate to the second document. Note that the Merge button contains a dropdown arrow. The choices are:

• Merge
• Merge into current document
• Merge into new document

The first choice is the default. Word opens the selected document and compares the two. Any missing text (missing from either document) is considered a deletion, and is marked as such. Any new text (in either document) is considered an insertion, and is marked. The resulting document now contains tracked changes that reflect the differences between the two documents.

The second choice, behind the scenes, opens the selected document and again compares the two. This time, however, the changes are placed into the document that was already open. The insertion/deletion tracking results are the same, however,

The third choice also results in the identical tracked changes. However, the resulting document is placed into a new document window, which you are free to save under an entirely new name.

However, your job is not done. Suppose, for example, that the original document was:

This is the original document.

This is the original document. Once upon a time, there were three little pigs.

This is the original document. T’was the night before Christmas, and all through the house…

Each user added something different after the first sentence. While in theory, you wouldn’t have such a conflict, since you usually would be making minor modifications to a document, not making wholesale changes. However, it’s not unusual for two different reviewers to each add sentences and phrases here and there. And, while they’ll sometimes flow harmoniously, sometimes they will be at odds.

If we start with User 1’s document and use Compare and Merge to open User 2’s document, the resulting document would be:

If we start with User 2’s document, the result is similar. However, the two insertions are reversed. So, as the editor of this fine piece of literature, it’s your job to determine whether either or both insertions stay, as well as in what order to present them.

Merging Marked Documents

When you run the Compare and Merge command on already-marked documents, Word attempts to merge all of the changes—insertions and deletions—into a single marked-up document. Again, you have the same three choices of where to place the merged document.

However, again, your job is not done. Depending on which document you start with, insertions made in the same location will be reversed in the two documents. Even so, it’s often a lot easier to deal with a single document containing proposed changes than it is to deal with two documents each containing proposed changes. It’s nice to have everything all in one place so you can vent your editing rage more efficiently. For those occasions, Compare and Merge can help.