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How to find every change between two versions of a contract
Spot every edit between two drafts of a contract, lease or policy: how to get clean text out of Word and PDF, compare it line by line, and avoid missing changes.
Why reading twice isn’t enough
When a revised contract comes back, the risky changes are rarely the big rewritten paragraphs. They are the small ones: *30 days* becoming *60 days*, *may* becoming *shall*, a deleted “not”, a new sentence in a clause you already agreed. Human eyes skip over familiar text, especially on the second and third read. A text comparison doesn’t.
Step 1: get clean text out of both versions
- Word or Google Docs: select all (Ctrl+A / ⌘A), copy and paste into the tool. If tracked changes are still visible, accept all changes in a copy of the file first, or you will compare the markup rather than the text.
- PDF with selectable text: open it, select all and copy. Check the pasted text: some PDFs break lines in the middle of sentences or add page headers between paragraphs.
- Scanned PDF: a scan is a picture, so there is no text to copy. You need OCR first, or ask the other party for the editable file.
Try to copy both versions the same way, from the same kind of file. Comparing a Word export with a PDF copy creates a lot of noise from different line breaks.
Step 2: compare
Paste the earlier version into Original text and the new one into Changed text in Text & Code Diff Checker, then press Compare. Removed lines are marked in red, added lines in green, and inside a changed line the exact words that differ are highlighted, so *30* → *60* stands out even in a long paragraph.
- Side by side is easiest for reading a contract; Unified shows changes in one column, which is better on a phone.
- Ignore spaces hides changes that are only spacing or line-break differences.
- The summary tells you how many lines were added and removed, a quick sanity check that you didn’t paste the wrong file.
In our tests, comparing two 5,000-line texts took 38 ms, so even long agreements compare instantly.
Step 3: check what a comparison can’t see
A text comparison shows changes to the words. It doesn’t show:
- Changes in formatting only, such as bold, numbering style or a moved table border.
- Changes inside images, signatures or scanned annexes.
- Changes in documents that are referenced but not attached, such as “the terms on our website”.
- Whether a change is legally significant. If a clause matters, ask the person who drafted it, or a lawyer, what it means.
Also compare the right pair: the version you last agreed, not the first draft, against the one you are being asked to sign.
Confidentiality
Contracts often contain names, prices and personal data. Text & Code Diff Checker compares the texts inside your browser and doesn’t send them anywhere, so you can use it for confidential drafts. To check a length limit on a clause or a summary, paste it into Word & Character Counter.