How to highlight word/character differences between 2 colunms?

[AtrioX]

Hello everyone,

I have cloned a text column in Calc, and made many grammar fixes on the second column. Some cells had to be completely rewrote, while others only needed quick fixes and word additions/removals, and others were left intact.

Now, I’d like to know if it’s possible to highlight the text differences between Column A (the original) and B (the revised one). To be more specific:

If I have “The sky is Blue” in A1 and “The sky is Green” in B1, I’d like to highlight that different word “Green” on B1, not the entire cell. This is not about checking grammar, only highlighting the changes made in B, when comparing it to A.

What seems tricky here is that since some cells simply needed some words to be removed, I’m not sure how I could indicate a word that is not present anymore. This is usually something I’ve always done manually, but since this spreadsheet is huge, it would be great if I could automate that process.

I hope I could explain my situation. Any help is much appreciated.

[Villeroy]

https://help.libreoffice.org/7.3/en-US/text/shared/guide/redlining.html?DbPAR=SHARED#bm_id3150499

[Wanderer]

Never did this inside calc, but there are a lot of “diff tools” for comparing text out there. So I would export your columns to two csv-files and start with diffuse for highlighting first (or check for the notepad++ plugin)

diff within a line

On syntax for diff-files: diff had an -e switch to generate a “modify script”" for a basic line-editor. Using output of diff -e with sed - Unix & Linux Stack Exchange