You have just finalized a contract of several dozen pages, you send it to someone to sign it and they send you back their signed copy. A fundamental question then arises: has the content been modified? Will I have to read these dozens of pages on a Friday evening at 20 p.m. to verify that nothing has been modified compared to the original?
These concerns are entirely legitimate and although there are electronic signature solutions for PDF documents that help avoid these kinds of problems, many people continue to use Word documents without version control.
A very effective solution to avoid this problem is to use a comparison program of texts between two documents. And the good news is that there are tools on the web that allow you to do this directly online!
Compare two documents with Diffchecker
This is the case, for example, of the Diffchecker site. This tool is specially designed to compare texts, but also spreadsheets, PDF documents, images and even entire folders.
The free version only works on the web, with ads, but does not even require creating an account. All you have to do is paste the text of the document into the first text field on the left and the content of the second document on the right. Once that is done, click on the “Find difference” button and wait for the result.
The result is presented in a very visual way. The lines or paragraphs on which there are differences are highlighted and the different elements on these lines are highlighted in darker to stand out. It is then easy to find all the differences!
In the example below on the first chapter of The Little Prince, I moved a sentence, deleted and added words… Everything was detected and reported!
As you will have understood, this tool is really very practical for comparing two long texts, but can also be used to compare two versions of a code in Python, JavaScript or any other programming language...
Diffchecker also works to compare images, PDFs, Excels…
Beyond comparing two texts, Diffchecker also offers tools to compare two PDF documents, two images or even two Excel files...
Within the framework of the comparison of two PDF files, you just have to upload the original PDF on the left and the one you want to compare it with on the right. A quick click on "Find difference" lets you start the mill to compare the two documents. The operation is very similar to that of two texts.
If the PDF corresponds to scanned documents, an option “OCR Text” allows you to identify the text in the PDF scanned to compare the two versions.
To compare two images, Diffchecker offers several distinct methods after loading the two images to be analyzed. First, it is possible to view the two images side by side to be able to compare them:
But it is also possible to use the "Fade" option to superimpose the two images and play on the transparency of the second one using a small slider. In the same genre, it is possible to use the "Slider" option to move a slide that reveals one or the other version of the photo.
Finally, the “Difference” option allows you to only display the differences between the two images on the screen! Super effective!
Diffchecker's latest tool allows you to compare two excel files in order to isolate the differences between the two.
Some features are only available in the paid version, such as installing the program on the computer, tracking differences in real time, comparing the contents of two folders or removing ads, but these features are far from essential. The pro version costs $9 per month.
ComPair is able to do this even when the 2 documents to be compared are not in the same language:
https://cubaix.com/ComPair_QuickStartGuide.php
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