Compare Text With Selection Diff Tool

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Saved my time for revisions.

I often make lists in Word and at times need to find out what I've changed. Selection Diff Tool provides a nice way to do this. You have to decide between seeing all the changes, including items in both lists but just moved around, or just the real changes with reordered items omitted. I also use it as a generalized diff tool that just happens to run in a task pane. I moved one of my lists into Excel and the app works in just the same way. If you need to select a column in Excel, here's a tip. Go to the Home tab Click the Find & Select button Go To... Reference Type something like A1:A5000 , where A is the column you want and 5000 means the column reaches down 5000 rows. Then hit one of the app's Get Selection buttons. Or just copy and paste. This is a great piece of software and has lots of uses. It is the best tool for comparing 2 lists out there.

I always wanted a simple to use diff tool and this is it! I use Word and Excel on a daily basis and it is good to be able to quick find out what I've changed from one part of the day to the other or what a colleague has edited. In fact you don't have to be a Word or Excel addict to make use of this. Once you have the app open in Word you can paste in any text from any application and it will diff the plain text parts of it. Despite the app's description, this app does work with multiple cell selections in Excel. The only thing it doesn't work with is if a whole column or whole row has been selected by clicking A, B, 1, 2 etc. Copying and pasting in text works just as well. It is also a great way to find out what has changed in lists as re-ordered items are shown in gray and blue, rather than red or green for new and deleted stuff. Brilliant! A very useful tool.

The percentage of blank space when displaying the results has now been changed. The app when run in Excel can now fetch text from multiple cell selections, so long as the cells are contiguous. If you click on an Excel row/column identifier (1, 2, 3, A, B, C etc) to select a whole row/column, "Get Selection #" doesn't work, but any other type of contiguous selection done another way does work. Copying and pasting directly in its text boxes directly always works. Important Tip: If you just select and copy across the column or columns making up the unique identifier for each row, then you can find out which ones have been added (red) and deleted (green). Blue and gray just means reordered. It may help to check "Show only changed paragraphs". In response to what Manuel said even without scrollbars it is possible to navigate up and down the results with the Next and Previous arrows.

Manuel's review is over-the-top. I'm a technical author and I find this very useful. It is meant for finding the differences between two smallish text selections. As it is in a task pane, it is quick to fire up and use. It is not meant to be a generalized difference utility - hence the low price. The key is in its name. It is a diff tool for text selections - nothing else. If Manuel needs a full difference tool, he should not be looking at Office 2013 apps. These are meant to be small, lightweight pieces of functionality. By their nature they only occupy a small piece of screen real-estate. If he needs a better Excel diff tool, perhaps he should try the software product "DiffEngineX" from the same company. Character level diffs there are shown both on the difference report and on workbook copies. The relevant cells with the differences highlighted can be re-sized at will.

Manuel's review is rather harsh. The diff software works. His comments are more a reflection of the fact the Office app is constrained in a task pane. In fact his comments apply to all Office apps. The window has limits to how much it can resize, but this is a reflection of the technology and being in a task pane. To be fair, unless you copy and paste into the app directly, in Excel this app is only mean to diff two Excel cells. Is Manuel writing whole essays into a single Excel cell? It is not usual to write large amounts of text in two cells. As the description says when run in Excel, it is handy to diff two long formulae. The app also works in Microsoft Word. ** If size is an issue, Manuel should select "Show only changed paragraphs" or "Show context". This would greatly cut down on the displayed text as only the differences would be shown.

Probably good for comparing prose. If you have more than very little Text in my case from two spreadsheets the diff-window wont resize anymore after a certain size. If you have 50 Lines of Text you have to manually choose to add Scroll bars which will reduce the size of the diff-window to a even much smaller space. After choosing Scrollbars it adds for whatever reason 50% blank space vertically and 30% blank space horizontally.

I always wanted something that I could use to quickly diff two pieces of text that didn't necessarily map to whole files. Although this operates as a part of Word 2013 and Excel 2013, this is essentially a clipboard diff tool. You select text, copy it in, do the same again and hit the "find differences" button and hey presto! you have all the differences. I find this much simpler to use that heavy weight, complex, multiple option compare file tools. There are no confusing 10 different panels with tens of different options. It tells you whether text has been moved up or down by use of the colors blue and gray. Not only that it changes the background color to light blue and yellow to indicate that phrases in a paragraph have been switched around. No other tools do this. "Show context" is the best option. You see just the differences with a tiny amount of context either side.