Comments (0)

By Leslie, July 25, 2011 3:33 am

Everyone take a deep breath and read on! Has this ever happened to you?

Your editor, agent or crit partner reviewed your manuscript. She loves what you’ve done! But she has a few things she wants you to look at. She’s sent back her changes in a copy of your manuscript. Maybe she used the tracked change feature, maybe she’s commented in-line but used a different color font. Now, when you look a the document you cannot tell what she added. You need to review those changes, but when you open the file they are gone! Well, not gone exactly but absorbed into your current document, and you can’t tell what’s original and what’s a change!

Maybe you inadvertently “Accepted All” changes or maybe the Demons of Microsoft ate them. Are you screwed? Well, perhaps not. If you need to know what was changed, removed, or added, and you have a previous version of the same document, you are golden. Yes, I do mean that, so pull up a chair and read on.

The wizards at Microsoft have embedded a number of useful yet oddly-named tools in their MS word application. The ability to Merge Documents is one. How can Merge Documents resurrect my lost changes? Because when the tool merges, it actually creates a Merged Document with all differences between the two tagged as tracked changes. Essentially, this tool answers the question:

How does this work? First, you need an older or original version of your document and the new version containing the hidden changes. The screen captures shown in the steps below are from Merge Documents in MS Word 2011 and 2008 for the Mac, but an analogous tool, calledCompare documents in Word 2007 for Windows, works the same and is found in the Review ribbon. See…(Look at windows screen capture on your right…) The comparison and document merging shown below can be done in both the Mac and Windows version of MS Word.

Step 1: In MS Word, open Compare Documents from the Tools menu.Selecting this will open the Merge Documents dialog box.

Step 2: There are really only two things to add and one setting to check in Merge Documents and I show them circled in red below:

1. Choose the old file, the one that has the unchanged information.
2. Choose the new file, the one that has new changes.
3. VERY IMPORTANT! At the bottom underShow changes in: choose New Document. This ensures that your original or revised document will not be overwritten! Luckily, this is also the default setting.

You can also change what you want compared in Comparison settings. Word defaults this to everything and I usually just leave it that way.

Once you have done this, click OK.

Step 3: The new merged file will now open. This file uses the Original document as the base and applies the changes from the Revised document as tracked changes. Sound complicated? It’s not. Here’s what it looks like for my current WIP Internet Millionaire’s Copilot:

You can now review the changes, accept what you want and toss the ones that you don’t need. Easy!