Problem solved by Diff Anything
Compare two Word revisions locally: the text of the body, headers, footers, footnotes, and endnotes, and formatting changes such as bold, fonts, and styles.
See it in the app
No accounts, cloud comparison service, analytics, or telemetry.
The problem
A DOCX file is a packaged document rather than plain text, and private contracts, drafts, or internal reports may not belong in an online comparison service. At the same time, a text extraction cannot answer visual questions about layout and styling.
The solution
Diff Anything extracts text from the Word body, headers, footers, footnotes, and endnotes on the computer, compares the resulting wording, and lists each changed line with the changed words marked. Where the text is the same, it also lists formatting changes, such as a word made bold or a paragraph style that changed. The boundary stays explicit: page layout, comments, and tracked-change state must be reviewed in Word or another document editor.
01 / Document boundary
Open the earlier document as the baseline and the proposed revision as the candidate. Keeping that direction stable makes additions and removals understandable during the review.
Use meaningful filenames or preserved document copies so the wording result remains connected to the actual revision history outside the comparison tool.
02 / Document boundary
Word comparison reads DOCX, DOCM, DOTX, and DOTM files: the main document body, headers, footers, footnotes, and endnotes. Each difference is shown with the words that were added, removed, or replaced. This is useful for wording changes that would be hard to scan across two long documents.
Where the text is the same, Word and OpenDocument text documents are also compared by their formatting: a word made bold, italic, or underlined, a changed font, size, colour, or highlight, and a paragraph whose style, alignment, or list level changed, reported as, for example, Paragraph 12: "quarterly results" made bold. Text changes, Formatting changes, or Both choose which are listed.
The result is not a page layout comparison. A moved text box, altered comment, tracked-change state, or pagination difference may require a separate review in the document editor.
03 / Document boundary
The document files and extracted text are processed on the Mac or Windows computer running Diff Anything. The app has no account, cloud comparison service, analytics, or telemetry.
An exported result can still contain private wording. Review any report before deliberately sharing it outside the local environment.
Clear answers
Yes. Diff Anything extracts text from the main document body, headers, footers, footnotes, and endnotes.
Formatting, yes: where the text is the same, a word made bold, a changed font, size, colour, or highlight, and a changed paragraph style, alignment, or list level are listed as formatting changes. Comments, tracked-change state, and page layout are not compared; review them in Word.
No. The selected documents are extracted and compared locally on the computer.
Three short steps
Open the baseline and revised DOCX files.
Review changes in the extracted body, header, and footer text, then the formatting changes.
Inspect page layout, comments, and tracked changes separately when they matter.
Available for macOS and Windows