ExcelCompare: Command line tool and API for diffing Excel Workbooks
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Re: ExcelCompare: Command line tool and API for diffing Excel Workbooks
#2[deleted]
Re: ExcelCompare: Command line tool and API for diffing Excel Workbooks
#3I work at a certain custodial bank and it's scary just how much of our business depends on Excel VBA. Something like this would be amazing as we have virtually no SCM / revision control for our critical spreadsheets.
Does anyone else know of any neat "can't-live-without" Excel utilities or add-ons that would make a software engineer's life a lot easier? A few weeks back someone posted ThingieQuery[0], which also looks fantastic. The IDE for VBA is awful, and I'll take any improvement I can get.
Re: ExcelCompare: Command line tool and API for diffing Excel Workbooks
#4Good strategy is to move all data transformation into Excel add-in Power Query and leave raw data in original format. No more copy/ paste of data. "Fat finger" events are minimized. Using PQ gets you moving towards more robust business process, data management and IT architecture.
Re: ExcelCompare: Command line tool and API for diffing Excel Workbooks
#5I work at a certain custodial bank and it's scary just how much of our business depends on Excel VBA. Something like this would be amazing as we have virtually no SCM / revision control for our critical spreadsheets. Does anyone else know of any neat "can't-live-without" Excel utilities or add-ons that would make a software engineer's life a lot easier? A few weeks back someone posted ThingieQuery[0], which also look…
[deleted]
Re: ExcelCompare: Command line tool and API for diffing Excel Workbooks
#6They should add this to Diffoscope " rel="nofollow">https://diffoscope.org/>.
Re: ExcelCompare: Command line tool and API for diffing Excel Workbooks
#7OOC, how much of the complexity for implementing this was getting the data out of the formats, and how much was implementing the diff once you had the data?
Re: ExcelCompare: Command line tool and API for diffing Excel Workbooks
#8It's interesting to see this written in Java, since the Excel application can be reached as a .NET object[0]. On top of that, Compare-Object is a built-in function for Powershell. Sure, with this built in Java you can use it to diff Excel spreadsheets on CentOS, but how often do you have those there? But in .NET most of the pieces are probably already there, so less work may have been needed to produce the same tool.
[0] http://www.madwithpowershell.com/2013/11/using-excel-functio...
Re: ExcelCompare: Command line tool and API for diffing Excel Workbooks
#9OOC, how much of the complexity for implementing this was getting the data out of the formats, and how much was implementing the diff once you had the data?
It looks like the Apache POI library gets the data out of the formats. The tool itself seems to compare the data cell-wise (i.e. A1 against A1 - no alignment seems to be attempted) and there doesn't seem to be any handling for merged cells, charts, pivot tables, filters, data validation, etc.
Re: ExcelCompare: Command line tool and API for diffing Excel Workbooks
#10Microsoft finally added the ability to compare two workbooks in Excel 2013:
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Basic-tasks-in-Spre...
Not a command line tool, and no API, but they delivered the basic feature. As far as I can tell, it isn't used very much.