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.

Techbits #2: KDiff3 - Visual & Recursive Diff Utility

Visual utility whether it be IDE for managing your codebase or something else is always desired. In the same context, a visual representation is also quite helpful when you want to compare files or directories, and this is exactly where the utility KDiff3 comes into picture.

KDiff3 provides a wide range of features like:

• File Comparison / Diff - Two-way (two files) and Three-way (three files)
• File Merge
• Integration with Windows Explorer - invoke the diff directly with a right-click
• Integration with source code control software like Rational ClearCase and Subversion
• Directory Diff / Folder Diff - Traversing folders recursively and performing folder & file comparison

The last of the aforementioned features, Directory / Folder Diff, is quite handy. It means you'll be able to select two directories and do a diff between them recursively - it'll tell you in what way are the directories differing i.e. which files are present, not present, present & same, present & different. It will also then let you transition and inspect the differences between a specific file in the two directories.

Note that the usage of the tool will not only increase your productivity but also reduce any mistakes or overlooks if you do the comparison manually. Apart from KDiff3, there are other mechanisms as well like the in-built diff functionality of Eclipse (if you use Eclipse as your IDE - but this option falls out if all you are interested in just file diff rather than code diff) and tools like WinMerge. Personally, though, I found KDiff3 very handy of all of them.

KDiff3 is officially hosted at http://kdiff3.sourceforge.net/.