Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Diff for Excel

ExcelCompare is a command-line tool (which requires Java) that can compare two Excel spreadsheets and output a list of differences in plain text (via Clark Goble). It seems crazy to me Excel, or for that matter Numbers, doesn’t have a diff feature built-in. Word, at least, has Tools ‣ Track Changes ‣ Compare Documents….

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It's very weird that Pages has a track changes whereas Numbers didn't. However I think by and large Numbers quickly got neglected. I suspect most of its team was moved to deal with iOS. It really should have had an update soon after its last release since so much was unfinished. I can but hope that with the management team shuffle last month that Numbers will get some of the love it needs. For short spreadsheets or layout it really is superior to Excel.

There also exists github.com/paulfitz/coopy
"Diffing, patching, merging, and revision-control for spreadsheets and databases."
The two core commands ssdiff & sspatch are also available via an API:
http://share.find.coop/gut

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