In the office or at work, many times we find ourselves with two documents with the same title and with the same size, without being able to distinguish one from the other effectively. Before making disasters and sending or sharing a wrong document, we can use one of the methods described below to compare texts and documents Word and PDF to see differences and unify them, so as not to have too many different versions of the same file and obtain the final document with all the changes already applied. In this guide, therefore, we will show you how to compare two similar Word or PDF documents, using both the tools made available by Microsoft Office and Adobe Reader and the programs and sites that allow you to perform this check completely automatically, without having to pay a EUR.
How to Compare Word Documents
If we have two identical Word files and we absolutely want to discover the differences within the text, just open the first document with Word, then press up on the Review menu and finally press the Compare button.
Pressing the Compare button in the drop-down menu will open a new window, where we will have to load the second document to be compared. For the comparison to work, the two files must have the same or similar name enough to trigger the comparison. At the end of the upload, a new window divided into 4 parts will appear, in which we will be able to see the changes in the left part (Revisions column), the original text in the center and the various versions of the same in the right part. By adding or modifying revisions, we will be able to bring everything together into a single document, ready to be printed or saved in a new position.
If, on the other hand, we want to directly integrate the revisions into our original document, we press up on Revisions, then on Compare and then on Combine : we will be able to upload the original document and the documents modified by our collaborators, so that we can combine all the changes into a single document the final.
For revisions of small documents we can also use the Tile function, present in the View menu.
Using the New Window and Split buttons you can split the Word window to load a new document, in order to also unlock the Tile, Continuous Scrolling and Reset Window Position buttons. Obviously with these functions the comparison will be all manual, we will have to carefully read both documents in order to immediately find the differences.
If we don't have Microsoft Word installed on our computer, we can rely on the free LibreOffice suite. Once downloaded on our computer we open the LibreOffice Writer program (the free Word), we open the first document then we press up on the Edit menu, then on Revisions and finally on Compare document .
In this way we will be able to compare all the revisions detected by the program and merge or modify where necessary, so that we can generate the final document.
How to compare PDF documents
If we need to compare two identical PDF documents, Adobe Acrobat Reader provides a dedicated but paid tool; if we don't want to spend money we can rely on the online application of PDF24 Tools, which allows you to upload the two PDFs and compare them.
All we have to do is press on Choose the file in the First file section, load the original PDF, press on Choose the file in the Second file section and load the modified or revised PDF. The site will read both and show us the differences between the two files, so that we can decide what to keep and what to correct if necessary. At the end of the work we can choose whether to merge the files or generate a new free PDF with all our approved changes, so that we can obtain a single PDF document ready to be printed or shared with colleagues.
In addition to local files, the site also allows you to upload documents stored in the cloud, specifically the files available on Dropbox or Google Drive.
Alternatively we can use the web application provided by Daftable Online.
In this case too, all we have to do is load the two files in the two boxes offered, pressing the respective Choose file buttons, then press Compare on the bottom. The site will upload our PDF files and begin the comparison, immediately showing us the differences and allowing us to modify or combine those that we deem appropriate to add or remove to the original document in our possession.
The site is very practical, it also supports Word documents (so we can use it as a free alternative to Office) but at the moment it has a limitation: we cannot upload documents larger than 10 MB and with more than 300 pages, so better adjust accordingly if we have such large files.
Conclusions
Comparing Word and PDF files is all in all very simple, despite the presence of paid tools (Microsoft Office and the extension for Adobe Acrobat Reader), we can compare Word and PDF texts and documents to see differences and unify them with LibreOffice and with some online sites, which offer valid tools accessible to everyone and simple to use even for users who are not very familiar with PC and technology in general.Still on the subject of comparisons, we can continue reading on our guide on how to find duplicate files on your computer, on how to find differences between images .
If instead we wanted to compare two apparently similar Excel tables, we can read our complete article on how to compare two Excel tables .
We don't know whether to use Office or LibreOffice for our business "> Better LibreOffice features compared to Microsoft Office.
