Text Compare
Last updated
Last updated
While MS Word natively offers you the possibility to compare two DOCX-files, this is often not enough. In your legal drafting practice, you also encounter situations where you have to compare:
your currently opened document to some PDF-file file received from your counterparty
two PDF-files received from your client
your currently selected clause with some new text sent by email by your colleague
two lengthy paragraphs that you copy/pasted from some webpage.
This is where ClauseBuddy Text Compare comes to the rescue!
Text Compare is very simple to use: essentially you upload a text-source to compare from (the original text) and a text-source to compare to (the modified text).
Each text-source can be either:
your currently opened document in MS Word
your current selection in MS Word
one or more paragraphs of text you type or copy/paste
another Word-document or PDF-document that you drag in (or select by clicking)
In the browser-version of ClauseBuddy, the first two options are obviously not available.
You can optionally configure how the comparison is run, by clicking on the Options button at the right-hand side.
In the Author box, you can specify whose name needs to appear in the comparison, i.e. who allegedly created the changes. This option is only relevant when you export the resulting comparison to a DOCX-file, as the name of the Author will then appear as the "author" of the revisiions/track changes.
When you enable Find moved paragraphs, ClauseBuddy will find paragraphs that were moved around and display them in green. When this option is not enabled, a moved paragraph will be marked as an insertion and a change, respectively.
When paragraphs were both moved and changed at the same time, ClauseBuddy will not mark the paragraphs as being moved.
When Ignore formatting is checked, ClauseBuddy will ignore changes in the formatting, i.e. not treat them as changes.
This option is checked by default, because formatting changes are usually not very relevant for legal comparison purposes. However, you may want to enable it in order to see whether certain text is formatted differently — e.g., only displayed in bold in one of the two documents, or with increased indentation in one document.
Don't disable this option when comparing PDF-files, because — due to the conversion from PDF to Word — the likelihood of having small formatting changes is quite high.
When Ignore case changes is checked, then capitalisation differences are ignored, i.e. are not treated as changes.
When Ignore headers & footers is checked (which is the case by default, because headers & footers tend to be less relevant for comparisons of typical legal documents), then any modifications in headers & footers are ignored, i.e. are not treated as changes.
When Ignore tables is checked (which is the case by default), then any modifications in tables (e.g., paragraphs within cells) are ignored, i.e. are not treated as changes. Usually you will want to keep this option disabled.
When you have uploaded all relevant document sources and (optionally) configured the comparison options, you are ready to go. Click on the purple Compare button at the bottom, and check the result.
While comparing DOCX-files is very fast — basically as fast as your Internet connection allows you to upload & download information to ClauseBuddy's server — you should be aware that comparing PDF-files can take some time, because the PDF-file(s) need to be converted into DOCX first.
In addition, you should take into account that conversions of PDF-files will inherently involve some noise (particularly when the PDF-file is a scanned document) and small conversion errors, which may inadvertently lead to small comparison errors as well.
An example of what the comparison may look like:
In this screen, you can perform the following additional actions through the buttons at the top:
By clicking on the Previous change and Next change buttons, you can jump between changes. (Note that moved paragraphs are being ignored by those buttons.)
By clicking on the Insert button, you can insert the text into your currently opened DOCX-file. (This is probably only relevant when you are comparing paragraphs of text — it makes little sense to insert a full document into your currently opened document.)
By clicking on the Docx or Pdf buttons, you can download the resulting comparison as a DOCX or PDF file.
You can click on the button in between the two text sources if you want to swap their ordering.
