Web App of the Week: CompareMyDocs

Posted 12/28/2009 at 7:00am | by David Murphy

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It happens to everybody. You're in charge of a big project at work (or school, if you're a younger Maximum PC fan). A group of people all email you their changes to a specific document at once, and it's your job to merge everyone's thoughts into one coherent final project. That sounds like an arduous task even if you're equipped with a program like Microsoft Word. If you're just relying on your eyeballs and good ol' Wordpad, however, you're in for quite a battle.

So stop. Don't try to go through these many, many documents and the many, many headaches that they'll deliver over the course of hours. There's a handy site that will make your editing life much easier, and it's as easy to operate as your standard word processor. In fact, I dare say it's even easier than a standard Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.org interface. The site's called CompareMyDocs and, as its name implies, it's an awesome tool for quickly tracking the changes between up to seven documents at once.

Hear that? Seven documents. How many can you you compare in Word? Two. And if that's not enough to whet your appetite, just wait until you see CompareMyDocs' interface. The left sidebar tracks all of the .doc, .docx, or .rtf files you've loaded into the app. Comparing multiple documents is as easy as clicking a mouse a few times. The respective differences pop up as balloon windows in the main text editing window. Hovering your mouse over these sections allows you to quickly select the almighty accept or delete option. Or, if you want to put on your editor's hat for a bit, you can just click the text and edit away yourself. Ta-da.

When you're done, CompareMyDocs allows you to save your final creation as a simple .doc file. And that's it--although the Web App lacks the complete feature suite of a typical Office application, it does a great job at its single role. For an ultimate document comparison tool, look no further than CompareMyDocs.