Microsoft Office Reference Guide

Mar 26, 2004

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While the Review feature has been part of Office for a long time, allowing a document to be routed among a set of colleagues who can each add marked changes, one particularly troubling aspect of the review process has not been addressed until now.

No matter how hard you try, it often happens that multiple versions of the same document get circulated, with different individuals making unrelated sets of changes.

SharePoint, Groove and the new Office Live attempt to address this issue by maintaining single repositories of files where THE main version can be stored and only checked out by the proper party.

But we all know that in the real world this is not always the case. Perhaps two senior partners are working on the same project and each decides to take the document home on the weekend and make his or her own set of changes?

Suddenly there are conflicting versions of the same file. How can they be reconciled?

Fortunately in MS Word 2007 there is a new Compare and Combine feature available in the Review tab of the Ribbon.

Figure 1

You can use the feature in order to compare the changes made by authors to two versions of the same document, or combine changes made by a number of reviewers to a pair of documents.

When you choose Compare, you load your original and revised documents into the Compare documents window. Note the additional options under More that determine the Comparison settings.

Figure 2

When you click OK, you are prompted to finalize any tracked changes as accepted in the revised document for purposes of comparison.

Figure 3

What you now get is a tri-panel view with your original document in the upper right, the revised document (by one or more reviewers in the lower right, and a Compared Document that you can work with in the center panel.

Figure 4

What this essentially gives you is a way to go through the various changes item by item one more (or last) time to reverse those that might have overridden better choices, and come to a final decision as to version.

A full list of the changes made to the document is also available in the far left panel, allowing you to see it by Comparison setting.

At any time you can use the Show Source Documents options to remove or restore the view of the original or reviewed document, allowing you concentrate only on the compared version.

Figure 5

Of course, the key step when you finally have it right (and perhaps removed the changes that caused problems because of conflicting versions) is to save the Compared Document with a file name and to a location where you can safely refer to it later as the final compared version.

(With the new file name saved it replaces the name Compared Document in the name panel at the top of the Word window). Now you can work with a version that has been saved just like any other document.

Figure 6

The difference with Combine Documents is that you use Combine to merge the tracked changes in two or more documents. Unlike the Compare feature, if the revised document contains tracked changes, these changes appear as tracked changes in the combined document. All changes from the various authors are shown and their revisions are ultimately merged to create one potentially final document.

You open the Combine the same way as Compare by loading the two documents to combine into the window and clicking OK — the same Comparison settings are available under More.

Figure 7

The Combine tri-panel view is similar to Compare, and you can hide or show the source documents in the same manner.

Figure 8

Once again you can work with the combined version of the document in the central panel. You can use the Review tab of the Ribbon to Accept or Reject any of the changes by any of the reviewers shown in the combined document, or simply incorporate your own changes to the ultimate version that you will finally save.

Figure 9

Obviously this is a great way to save the efforts that may have been duplicated or destroyed as multiple reviewers have saved different versions of a document.

Hopefully you can reduce the number of actual versions down to two before doing a final Compare or Combine pass.

You can also keep the reviewer names and other information confidential in a compared document. Reject all the changes in a copy of the document that has been reviewed and use that as the original. When you display the Compare panels, in the Revised area you can use another generic name like Reviewer in the Label Changes With text box; all the revision dates and times will show those from when the comparison was done.

While this tool is particularly useful in structured environments where there is a set policy for review of documents; in fact Compare and Merge Documents was a feature of previous versions, it can be helpful today when you work in less structured situations online.

If you send documents as email attachments without a strict policy or pay careful attention to versions, you can end up with two different sets of revisions to a single documents by return email.

Now you can use the Compare and Combine feature of Word to load them into a tri-panel window and choose those elements from both versions that suit you, and save them as a final version.

InformIT Articles and Sample Chapters

Introduction to Word 2007

Using Word 2007 Quick Parts and Building Blocks

Books and eBooks

2007 Microsoft® Office System Inside Out (Safari Books Online)

Word 2007: The Missing Manual (Safari Books Online)

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