February 19, 2012

Techbits #4: How to compare excel sheets?

In case you ever wondered about how to compare excel files/sheets, then this is for you.

A quick Google search leads you to lot of tools many of which are commercial. There do exist open source utilities as well like Spreadsheet Compare. Another tool is Office Diff that can be used to compare other file formats like word (doc) also apart from excel (xls).

Note that the former was found to be not working in some cases while the latter was not as rich as the former. Given this, the following approach is what I would recommend that works always. You do not need any tool to perform the diff although it might be a little bit more involved and not as straightforward. All that you'd need to do is to:
  1. Export the excel sheets to tab-separated or comma-separated text files.
  2. Use any text diff utility like KDiff3, which was shared previously, to compare the text files.
That's it! You're ready to compare excel files whether they are holding your work related data like project requirements or personal data like expenses, track sheets etc.

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