Viewing Two Documents Side by Side

When you share a document with another person, you usually turn on revision marks, so that you can see the changes the other person makes. Unfortunately, it often happens that the other person accidentally turns off revision marks before or in the middle of editing so that  you can no longer easily see the changes he made. In the past, this meant opening the two versions and then switching from one window to another or trying to arrange the documents, so that you could see both at once.

Word 2007 helps you avoid this extra work by offering a new View Side By Side feature, which arranges the document windows so that you can easily compare the two files. Here’s how it works :

1. Open the two documents you want to compare and make one of them the active document.
2. Choose View, View Side by Side. Word displays the Compare Side By Side dialog box.
3. Click the other document you want to use and then click OK. Word arranges the two windows side by side, as shown in figure.

The View Side  By Side feature includes synchronous scrolling, which means that as you scroll up or down ( or even side by side) in one document, Word scrolls in the same direction and by the same amount in the other document. If you find this distracting, you can turn it off by choosing View, Window, Synchronous Scrolling

You can get Word to help you compare the two documents. Choose Review, Compare, Compare to open the Compare Documents dialog box. Use the Original Document list to specify the original document and use the Revised Document list to select the document with changes. If you want to specify what changes to look for, click More and use the check boxes to modify the Comparison Settings. Click OK, and Word opens a Compare Result window, which includes the Original Document pane, the Revised Document pane, the Reviewing Pane with a list of the changes and a Compared Document pane that combines the changes into a single document.