How to Compare Two Documents Side-by-Side in Word 2016

Word 2010 For Dummies

A quick and handy way to review two documents in Word 2016 is to arrange them side by side. Both documents are visible on the screen and their scrolling is locked so that you can peruse both in parallel. Here's how to accomplish this trick:

Open both documents.
On the View tab, in the Window group, click the View Side by Side button.

Word instantly arranges both documents in vertical windows, with the current document on the left and the other on the right.
Scroll either document.

Scrolling one document also scrolls the other. In this mode, you can compare two different or similar documents.

You can disable synchronous scrolling by clicking the Synchronous Scrolling button, found in the Window group.
When you're done, choose View Side by Side again.

About This Article

About the book author:

Dan Gookin has been writing about technology for 20 years. He has contributed articles to numerous high-tech magazines and written more than 90 books about personal computing technology, many of them accurate.
He combines his love of writing with his interest in technology to create books that are informative and entertaining, but not boring. Having sold more than 14 million titles translated into more than 30 languages, Dan can attest that his method of crafting computer tomes does seem to work.
Perhaps Dan’s most famous title is the original DOS For Dummies, published in 1991. It became the world’s fastest-selling computer book, at one time moving more copies per week than the New York Times number-one best seller (although, because it’s a reference book, it could not be listed on the NYT best seller list). That book spawned the entire line of For Dummies books, which remains a publishing phenomenon to this day.
Dan’s most recent titles include PCs For Dummies, 9th Edition; Buying a Computer For Dummies, 2005 Edition; Troubleshooting Your PC For Dummies; Dan Gookin’s Naked Windows XP; and Dan Gookin’s Naked Office. He publishes a free weekly computer newsletter, “Weekly Wambooli Salad,” and also maintains the vast and helpful Web site www.wambooli.com.