Compare Different Versions Of Documents
Have you ever gotten a long document sent back to you
with edits? From someone who doesn’t know how to use the Track Changes
feature in Word? Do you need to incorporate changes from a number of
different editors into a master document?
It’s best to have everyone in your department set their user names in MS
Office. Go to Tools > Options and click on User Information. The typical
install says something like ‘Valued Microsoft Customer’ which isn’t very
useful; especially when nine different people are called ‘Valued Microsoft
Customer.’ Have everyone put in a name or nickname or departmental position
and title.
Once everyone has set their user information, then they should use Tools
> Track Changes when editing a document along with lots of other editors.
It’s easier for the owner of the document to decide what changes to accept
and what changes to reject when they can see who suggested the changes.
Changes about how a product functions made by the product manager should
probably be accepted; pricing changes suggested by people who have little
view into the business model can be safely rejected.
What happens when an editor doesn’t know how to use or simply doesn’t
remember to turn on Track Changes? Word has a feature that allows documents
to be compared and merged even when they don’t have Track Changes turned on
– in fact, you can Compare And Merge any documents like text files or web
pages.
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We decided we wanted to improve Shakespeare’s The Tempest by
having a committee review it. Unfortunately, no one knew about Track Changes
and one person sent back the file in plain ASCII text format! Not a problem
with Compare and Merge Documents:
Go to Tools > Compare and Merge Documents
Choose the file to be merged and compared – that’s all there is to it!
Do be careful with one thing: if you are comparing a text file to a Word
document, be sure to turn off ‘Find Formatting’ as shown in the graphic
above. Every single character in a text file has different formatting
(NONE!) than every single character in a Word document. It just isn’t useful
to have Word point out the ‘differences’.
After you’ve brought in a document you want to compare, use the Reviewing
toolbar to move from one edit to the next and decide whether to accept or
reject it. You can see the
process in action in our Tips and Tricks
video section, so please have a look.
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