Comparing two MS Office Word 2007 documents

Today I discovered the most useful feature of Microsoft Office Word 2007: Compare!

When tasked with the challenge of comparing two versions of a lengthy legal document, to determine what changed, I thought for sure I was doomed to read side by side print outs (or on screen displays), or install some tool that would require converting to ascii (and then I could use 'diff', for Unix's sake!).

But Microsoft bless, I found one reason to really like Microsoft today, and that feature is called Compare.

Enough blithering, here's how it works:
Open MS Word
Choose Review > Compare
compare two versions of a single document (legal blackline)
Select the original and revised documents.

And, as if by Microsoft Magic, you'll have a list of changes between the documents.



Open MS Word 2007,