How to compare two versions of a Microsoft Word document

Comparing different versions of Microsoft Word documents is helpful for identifying changes between drafts. However, you don’t have to do it the old fashioned way. Word has a built-in feature called Track Changes, which will automatically highlight these changes for you.

In the Review ribbon of the Word document, you can select For All or Only Mine to highlight all edits to a text. If you haven’t activated this function, it’s still possible to compare at least two different versions of a document.

To do this, click on Compare in the Review ribbon and select the two files under Original Document and Revised Document. Under Mark Changes With, Word allows you to insert the name of the editor into the document.

After clicking on the Expand button, you can select which changes the word processor should highlight in the document. Insertion and deletion processes are set, all other displays can be deselected. This means that it’s not always necessary to check formatting changes again afterwards.

Under Show Changes, you can choose whether the changes should be displayed at a word or character level and whether they should be applied to the original document, the revised document, or a new document.

Click on the OK button to confirm the settings. Word now shows you the individual revisions on the left-hand side. In the center, you can see the changes in the edited document and on the right-hand side you can compare the two texts directly with each other using two windows. If you scroll down in the center window, the texts in these windows will also scroll with you.