If you work in a office and need to deal with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, RTF, Text, HTML, XML, DOCX files for your day today work, then you must have got into a situation when you need to compare a file to the original version of the file to keep track of the changes that may have occured during time either by you or your colleagues.

In Microsoft word, it is possible to keep track of changes in the document but its very difficult to keep track of changes in other document formats. Even in MS word, sometime, we forget to turn the option of “track changes”.

Diff Doc is a great tool which lets you compare files of all types including MS Word/Excel/PowerPoint, PDF, RTF, Text, HTML, XML, DOCX and more.  It does the job quite accurately in tracking the changes made compared to the original file. It is simple to use and you dont need to buy it as its Free.

Features

  • Compare documents of MS Word (DOC, DOCX etc), Excel, PDF, Rich Text (RTF), Text, HTML, XML, PowerPoint, or Wordperfect and retain formatting.
  • Choose any portion of any document (file) and compare it against any portion of the same or different document (file).
  • Word to word or letter to letter comparisons. See to the letter what changed in a sentence.
  • Compare files of any type against any file type (i.e. Compare PDF to a Word document).
  • Both ‘Side By Side’ and the ‘All In One’ difference views are supported.
  • Change the colors and formatting used to highlight the document changes.
  • Integrated into the Explorer Shell (Windows Explorer, Desktop, Find In Files etc ) for quick comparisons. Use the Right Mouse click to initiate.
  • Easy Navigation and User interface (GUI)
  • Paragraph differences are highly detailed.
  • Compares text from any application by cutting and pasting into ‘Diff Doc’.
  • Save any of the views as DOC, Text, RTF or HTML format.
  • Detailed HTML Reports now possible allowing of printing and e-mailing results quickly. Both Side By Side and All In One compare reports are supported.
  • Text and Comma Delimited reports also available.
  • Compare folders first, then quickly see what files are different and compare with a mouse click.

Apart from File comparison, it also supports comparison of folders which lets you Compare folders first and it tells you differences in the folder (if any) specifying the files that are different. After that you can compare the files one by one.

We did a clean install of Diff Doc on our desktop and compared two MS Word files for the differences. Both files had “track changes” option put off. After we selected the two files side by side and Ran it, it took some time to compare the files. The time is dependent on how many pages your files have as it needs to read both the files and then compare it. Still for me, it was over in 10-15 secs for a 8 pages file. The output window showed me the differences between the two files just in the same way as MS word shows you when the “Track changes” mode is ON in files.

The results were amazing and I can bet that this tool is going to save a lot of time for me as I need to do a lot of word which involves same files with many changes. In the screenshot above, I have blurred the content of files for the sake of privacy.

Download Diff Doc

Conclusion

As you can see from the huge list of features above, it is an excellent piece of software and that too for Free. We can say this without doubt that it is the the best document comparison tool we have never used.

The only issue with the Free version is a nag screen that comes up after every fifteen minutes which reminds you if you want to buy it. That screen is not a big issue as it can be closed easily by pressing the close button. Apart from that, there is no limitation in terms of features or any other restrictions unlike many other trial or even free applications (e.g. some include Watermarks ).