Google Apps Hacks

203  - COMPARE TWO POSTS TO SEE THE CHANGES

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Now, if you managed to copy the old version from somewhere, go to the live version of the post

(such as http://example.com/2008/foobar.html) and copy it as well. You now have two copies of

the article, but how do you compare them?

The best solution to this is decisively simple in retrospect, but nothing you’d necessarily think of

automatically—Amit Agarwal of the highly informative tips and tricks blog Digital Inspiration

(http://labnol.org) did, though.

Open a Google Docs document at http://docs.google.com by selecting New→Document from the

menu. Give the document a tting title, like “Foobar,” and paste the oldest version of the blog post

that you recovered into it. Save the document. Now select all text within the document and paste the

newest version of the blog post over it. Then jump to the Revisions tab of the document, check the

boxes next to the old and new versions (Figure 8-17), and click Compare Checked. The result is a nicely

color-highlighted formatting of whatever word or sentence changed in the article, as shown in Figure

8-18. (Note that although the algorithmically selected highlights are not always in the most intuitive

places, usually you will get an idea of what was changed.)

This approach of le comparison works with any other text document, too. If you want more

featur ...