Habitually Good

A post earlier on How-To Geek reminded me of a function that I use very frequently when I need to work with multiple documents in Word or Excel. The How-To Geek post talks about how you can select multiple windows on the taskbar and then right-click them to tile them vertically (a technique that I use almost every day).

While I can do this with Word (or Excel) documents, what is much more useful is the functionality that is built into these two applications that allow you to also compare documents side-by-side. Here are the steps that you need to follow:

1. Open up the documents that you need to work with side-by-side and go to any one of these.
2. Then go to the View Tab on the Ribbon and look for the “View Side by Side” button and click it.
3. In case, you have more than two documents open, Word (Excel) will ask you which document you want to compare the current document with.

When you do this, your entire desktop will be covered with these two documents which will be arranged vertically side-by-side.

How this is different from the technique described by The Geek is that in this form, the documents also have Synchronous scrolling which you can turn off if needed. So, if you scroll one document, the other document scrolls with it (vertically or horizontally). If you zoom one document, the other document will zoom with it. And so on.

The only limitation is that you can only work on two documents at a time. With the taskbar method you can work with more (though without synchronous scrolling). This is also helpful at times:

Note: I have shown how this works with 2007 versions of Word and Excel. However, I seem to remember that this was available in earlier versions as well. If anyone can confirm this, please leave a comment.

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