Compare Word documents

You have two versions of the same Word document and want to know exactly what changed from one to the other. In Verso, you drop both .docx files onto the page and read the differences side by side: the previous version on the left, the new one on the right, with every word that came in in green, every word that went out in red and any passage that moved in yellow.

How to compare two Word documents in Verso

1. Open the app in your computer's browser and sign in with your Google account.
2. Drop the previous version in the first slot and the new one in the second.
3. Read only what changed. The navigation buttons, or the n and p keys, jump from one change to the next.

You don't need Word installed or open, and you don't need Track Changes turned on beforehand: Verso compares the two files as they are.

What counts as a change, and what doesn't

• Counts: every word added, deleted or replaced, and any paragraph or chapter that changed position, which shows up as moved, not as deleted on one side and written on the other.
• Doesn't count: bold, italics, font, margins and spacing. Neither do the curly quotes, dashes and ellipses that Word's autocorrect swaps on its own, nor empty paragraphs.

That's what separates a text revision from a change in appearance. If someone only changed the font of the whole document, Verso tells you there's no difference.

Long documents, chapter by chapter

If the document uses the Heading 1 style for its titles, Verso splits it into those chapters and shows how many changes each one has. Without styles, it looks for CHAPTER 1, PART 2, PROLOGUE or EPILOGUE written in the text; without any of that, it splits the text into parts of similar length. Chapters with no changes stay hidden, so you only read what was touched.

In our tests, a 63,000-word book in .docx is read and compared in about a tenth of a second.

Word with PDF, LibreOffice or plain text

The two versions don't have to be in the same format. You can compare a .docx with a PDF, with a LibreOffice .odt, with a .txt or with a .md. The most common case is checking the PDF that came back signed or typeset against the .docx you sent. See how it works in compare PDFs.

What about Word's own Compare?

Word for Windows and Mac has a Compare feature on the Review tab, and it handles a quick comparison between two .docx files well. It needs Word, counts formatting changes along with text changes unless you turn that off, and shows the result in a third document, with old and new text interleaved as tracked changes. The steps, and how the two differ, are in how to compare two documents in Word.

The file never leaves your computer

The document is read and compared inside your browser. Verso's server has no address that accepts a file: it only handles sign-in and the license. That matters when the document is a contract, an unpublished manuscript or research that isn't out yet. The FAQ entry on this shows how to check it in your browser's Network tab.