If you need text markup, try saving both files as plain text copies and run
the comparison on those. Word's document comparison capabilities are not all
that great, at one time Microsoft recommended using third-party software for
complex documents. See http://addbalance.com/usersguide/track_changes.htm.
--

Charles Kenyon

Word New User FAQ & Web Directory: http://addbalance.com/word

Intermediate User's Guide to Microsoft Word (supplemented version of
Microsoft's Legal Users' Guide) http://addbalance.com/usersguide

See also the MVP FAQ: http://www.mvps.org/word which is awesome!
--------- --------- --------- --------- --------- ---------
This message is posted to a newsgroup. Please post replies
and questions to the newsgroup so that others can learn
from my ignorance and your wisdom.

"Roscoe" wrote in message
ups.com...
I am trying to compare two revisions of a document (manually revised in
separate documents, not using any of the built-in revision features).
Each is almost 200 pages long and contain several tables.

As you might guess, Word choked and hung before completing the
comparison. So I broke the files into managable "chunks".

Two problems I cannot escape however:

1) One paragragh caused a bizarre problem in that everything after it
was marked as deleted and replaced even though it appeared to be 99+%
common, thus burying the wheat deep in the chaff. If I manually made
the paragraph the same as the original, the delete/replace problem
would go away and following individual changes would be identifed as
designed. As I incrementally re-typed the changes and repeated the
comparison, it would eventually reach the point (and it didn't take
many changes) where Word would again gag and show the entire remaining
piece of the document as deleted and replaced. Finally I had to just
make the "chunk" break right after that paragragh rather than before to
get past that problem. However, any ideas as to workable solutions out
there and possible explanations for the problem?

2) The other problem is that the large tables produced the same issue
as above, but that wasn't a surprise and revisions in tables have
always been flaky. Anticipating that however, I saved the table
"chunks" as text files to remove all of the formatting issues and then
ran the compare. Did not go far into the document before it repeated
the same behavior described above. Again...ideas?

Thanks

Roscoe