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About this lesson
Comparing documents takes two versions of a document and compares for changes.
Exercise files
Download this lesson’s related exercise files.
Compare Documents - Exercise 1.docx38.4 KB Compare Documents - Exercise 2.docx
37.5 KB Compare Documents - Exercise Solution.docx
38.1 KB Combine Documents - Exercise Solution.docx
39.1 KB
Quick reference
Compare Documents
Compare and Combine documents takes two versions of a document and compares for changes or combines all changes. The Track Changes feature is applied and allows you to accept or reject the changes.
When to use
Any time a document has to be checked side-by-side for changes, this is an electronic task that can be done in seconds.
Instructions
Review Ribbon, Compare
Compare the two documents:
- Click Compare and open the two documents, Original and Revised, click OK.
- A brand new document is created.
- Track Changes has now been applied to the document and you can use the features in the previous Track Changes lesson to manage the file.
- To view the changes in a pane rather than on the actual document screen, Click “Reviewing Pane” and choose Vertical or Horizontal.
When finalizing a document, click the Accept/Reject buttons, and the markup lines in the left margin will disappear.
Combine two documents:
- Click Combine and select the two documents. From here, the steps are similar to comparing two documents.
- A brand new document is created.
- Track Changes has now been applied to the document and you can use the features in the previous Track Changes lesson to manage the file.
- 00:00 In this lesson again on the review ribbon, we're going to compare two documents.
- 00:06 And then we're going to combine two documents.
- 00:12 So comparing means we just want to look at two versions of it.
- 00:15 And combining means we want to blend it together.
- 00:18 This is an extension of the tracking and the accepting or rejecting changes.
- 00:23 So this becomes part of our process.
- 00:27 It's three step this time.
- 00:29 Let's go ahead and get started.
- 00:31 Even though I have my documents open,
- 00:33 that is not required because it's going to make me point to those documents again.
- 00:37 So I'll click the compare option, the dialogue box opens up and
- 00:41 I'll go ahead and click and find my documents.
- 00:44 Compare exercise one on the left.
- 00:47 Compare exercise two on the right.
- 00:49 And it wants me to go ahead and type in a word to label the changes with.
- 00:54 Now before I hit OK, which is very tempting,
- 00:57 I'm going to hit the More button.
- 00:58 When this opens up, I can tell it what I want to track and what I don't, so
- 01:03 I don't really want to compare the headers and footers, but
- 01:07 I definitely want this to land in a brand new document.
- 01:10 I do not want it to affect my two originals.
- 01:12 Go ahead and click okay.
- 01:14 On the screen comes the comparison document.
- 01:17 You can see the old ones are crossed out, the new ones are underlined.
- 01:21 And on the right we have original document, revised document.
- 01:25 As I scroll through this, this is called synchronized scrolling each of the two
- 01:30 little squares on the right or scrolling with me.
- 01:33 If I click into just one of these, it scrolls both of them almost to the end.
- 01:38 But on the bottom one, exercise two, that scrolls alone, pretty interesting,
- 01:42 I think, depending on where you're at, you'll get a scrolling review.
- 01:46 Speaking of reviewing, on the tracking button, there's a reviewing pane,
- 01:51 when I activate that I get an entire list of all the changes here, so
- 01:54 if this is a long document, it's easier to look at the reviewing pane,
- 01:58 than it is to scroll through the pages and pages of the document.
- 02:02 For now, I'll go ahead and turn that off.
- 02:05 Take a look at the top.
- 02:06 The name of my document is Compare Result number 10.
- 02:10 Now I can save that as and have a brand new document, and
- 02:13 it won't affect my two originals at all.
- 02:15 Before I go on and save this, it doesn't look like a full document,
- 02:19 if tracking is on, we have to accept all the changes before we can turn it off.
- 02:24 So I'm going to click into the main document, come over to the Accept button,
- 02:28 accept all changes, and stop tracking.
- 02:31 Go ahead and click that, and now I can save the document.
- 02:36 All right, I'm going to close that one and we'll start this again.
- 02:40 On the Compare button, we're going to go to Combine this time.
- 02:44 I'll go ahead and find those documents again.
- 02:47 Compare exercise one on the left, Compare exercise 2 on the right.
- 02:52 I have two changes I can make here.
- 02:57 So my original doc will be named number one,
- 02:59 my revised doc will be named number two.
- 03:01 Same story, I don't want to compare headers and footers,
- 03:03 I absolutely want a new document.
- 03:05 This will combine and blend together,
- 03:07 it will look slightly different than the comparison.
- 03:11 Now the comparison document, these were all the same color,
- 03:14 now they're separate colors.
- 03:16 Kind of a cool feature.
- 03:18 Noting again that I can turn on the reviewing ribbon to take a look at
- 03:22 everything without scrolling through the document.
- 03:25 Synchronized scrolling, still works.
- 03:28 Check out this on the Compare though,
- 03:31 I can show source documents or I can hide the source documents.
- 03:36 So this way it's not as confusing with all those squares scrolling around on my
- 03:40 screen.
- 03:41 Now, as you can see, the little markup lines in the margin,
- 03:44 that means I have not accepted these changes.
- 03:47 So I'm going to come up to the Changes section,
- 03:51 hit the drop down on Accept, Accept all changes and stop tracking.
- 03:56 And now I can go ahead and save this as my combined file.
- 04:01 It might be a little confusing, but work with it,
- 04:06 there's a definite purpose to compare versus combine,
- 04:11 and then of course we can turn off or
- 04:15 show our source documents during the process.
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