One of the most tedious, nitpicky and all-around wretched parts of my job is to compare the clean revised manuscript files to the annotated manuscript files [where the authors explicitly show what has been changed]. In particular, we compare the figure legends in the clean to the figure legends in the annotated. Sometimes authors will make changes in one document, but not the other, and we need to know which is the correct version.

As it currently stands, we open up the clean and annotated legends in side-by-side windows in Word and read them, looking for differences. You can imagine the potential for human error that creeps in. You can also imagine how much time this takes if the average manuscript has maybe 45 images, each with a legend. You can imagine how much I hate doing this.

So, when I don't like doing something, I look for a way around it, either by delegating it to someone else or automating it. In this case, I can't delegate the cross-checking, and I don't want to, because then I'd have to cross-check the delegate's work, which would waste more time.

Automation it is! I said to myself, "MS Word is a bloated and hugely overpowered program. It's got to have some feature that can compare documents and compile a list of changes, right?" Why yes, yes it does.

I quickly Googled the topic and came up with several sites, most of which didn't help me because they talked about merging the documents into one, which I do not wish to do. Eventually I discovered this series of instructions, and I made two files, one of the clean legends and one of the annotated legends. Then I compared them.

Less than 5 seconds later, I had a list of differences between the documents. It was mind-blowingly simple. It saved me so much time! I need to research this more, but soon I shall tell my coworkers, and we can institute this procedure and become much more efficient.

I'm mostly excited because I think I've found a way to accomplish the same results as the human-powered cross-checking, but without any of the tedium and error.