Dupe guide

Spot duplicate Word and Pages files on Mac

Find duplicate .docx, .doc, and .pages files across your Mac, even when they have different filenames.

4 min read

You drafted the same letter three times. You saved a contract as .docx and later as .pages. Someone emailed you back the file you’d sent them, and now you have both. Word and Pages files multiply quietly and never get cleaned up because everyone’s afraid of losing the “real” version.

Two paths

The native way: Finder + manual compare

  1. Open Finder. Use Cmd+F and search for “Kind: Document” or by extension (.docx, .doc, .pages).
  2. Switch to List view and sort by Size.
  3. Files with the exact same size are duplicate candidates.
  4. Open suspected pairs in Word or Pages to verify identical contents.
  5. Drag the redundant copy to the Trash.

This works for ten files. For a real-world Documents folder with hundreds of .docx and .pages files, opening every suspected pair is impractical. And Finder will happily show you two same-size docs that turn out to have completely different content.

The Dupe way

Dupe hashes every Word and Pages file with SHA-256. Two files match if and only if their bytes are identical, regardless of what they’re named or where they sit.

  1. Install Dupe and open it.
  2. Click “Add Folder” and add Documents, Desktop, Downloads, and any iCloud Drive folders.
  3. Click “Scan.”
  4. Browse the duplicate groups. Each shows file paths so you can see whether a copy is in Documents/Contracts versus Desktop/old.
  5. Select the copies to remove and click “Move to Trash.”

Important caveats specific to Word and Pages files:

Safety:

If you’ve been saving “FINAL_v3_REAL_FINAL.docx” copies for years, a Dupe scan over Documents and Desktop will surface the byte-identical duplicates without confusing them with revisions.

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