How to Compare Word Documents using C#

In this how-to tutorial, we explain the step-by-step process to compare Word documents using C# by using one of the popular document comparison library. Further, this guide helps you to quickly develop the functionality to compare two Word documents and highlight differences in C#. Here are the detailed instructions to compare Word files as well as a functional example for it.

Steps to Compare Word Documents using C#

  1. Install GroupDocs.Comparison for .NET package from the NuGet website in the .NET project
  2. Add a reference to the GroupDocs.Comparison namespace to compare two Word files
  3. Create an instance of the Comparer class and pass the source Word file to its constructor
  4. Call Add method of the Comparer class and specify the target Word document
  5. Finally, call the Compare method to save the resultant file to the disk

In the above section, we have listed the points to compare Word documents for differences using C#. These instructions can be easily implemented on any operating system like MS Windows, Linux, and Mac OS without installing any third-party software. Further, comparing Word documents functionality can be completed by consuming a couple of API calls of the document comparison library.

Code to Compare Word Documents using C#

We have used the steps defined in the previous section to develop a sample code to compare two Word documents for differences in C#. This example can be further extended to compare more than two Word documents by keep adding the other documents using the Add method of the Comparer class. Moreover, you can quickly compare documents for other formats such as PDF, DOC, XLSX, PPTX, VSDX, ODT, JPG, and many more.

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