# In depth
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!
## Basic usage
### 1. Select your text sources
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)
You can click on the button in between the two text sources if you want to swap their ordering.
{% hint style="info" %}
In the browser-version of ClauseBuddy, the first two options are obviously not available.
{% endhint %}
### 2. Optional: configure the comparison
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.
{% hint style="info" %}
When paragraphs were both moved and changed at the same time, ClauseBuddy will not mark the paragraphs as being moved.
{% endhint %}
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.
{% hint style="warning" %}
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.
{% endhint %}
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.
### 3. Perform the comparison
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.
{% hint style="info" %}
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.
{% endhint %}
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.
---
# Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation
If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question.
Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter:
```
GET https://help.clausebuddy.com/text-compare/how/in-depth.md?ask=
```
The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language.
The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation.
Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.