When working on a document or project, sometimes it is necessary to create more than one file. The problem with that is, over time, you may not remember which one has all the edits that you want. This is often complicated when more than one person is editing the document – which is why Google Docs is handy but I certainly understand some company’s hesitation on putting certain documents on third party servers. One quick way is to look at the date the document was modified. But sometimes that won’t work. You actually need to compare the contents of the documents to see where the changes were made.

Most of the time, I work with text files so an open source tool like WinMerge has worked really well. WinMerge also can compare folder contents. What if you want to compare documents?

For Open Office, open the first document, then go to Edit >> Compare Document >> look up the 2nd document to compare with.

For Microsoft Word 2007 which I do not have I was told you go to Review >> Compare

What if you have neither? Diff Doc might help. It can do DOC, XLS, PDF, HTML, Powerpoint and still retain its formatting – that’s the claim. The price is quite hefty though at $199 per copy. They do have a free download so you can evaluate if it is the right tool before putting down that chunk of hard earned cash for it.