Excel Gurus needed

[Izzo]

Does anyone know of a quick and easy way to find differences between two versions of a spreadsheet? I have a version of the spreadsheet that I worked on Tuesday. Coworker took an older version of the spreadsheet and made some modifications to a couple of tabs. I want to compare and contrast the two spreadsheets to make sure the changes i made on to the other tabs on Tuesday are in the newer versions. Any suggestions?


BTW, these spreadsheets are 10 tabs long, with each tab having 2,000-22,000 lines of data. So checking by hand is not an option.

TIA

 

[Carazariah]

Izzo,

I take it you didn't use the Share workbook and Track change options in Excel? If you did you can go to Tools under Excel 2003 PC and choose the Compare and Merge Feature that will allow you to merge in changes into a single spreadsheet. (BEFORE YOU DO THIS MAKE BACKUP COPIES OF BOTH WORKBOOKS)

Excel 2002 and 2003 both have these and 2000 I think, I tried turning these on and editing a dummy test workbook, but the "Compare and Merge" feature didn't work on a workbook that I just turned on the features for. I believe if you have Tracking enabled, you could do this and in Word you can compare any two documents, but for some reason Excel is'nt coded to allow this. I'm not really sure why.

If you want to give it a try you can choose the Track Changes option under tools then save and see if you can choose the "Compare and Merge" feature, if you can you can choose your second workbook and give it a try, but I'm not sure it will work unless Track changes was enabled. . . YMMV. . .

GL

C

 

[Izzo]

No, we weren't using the sharing option with track changes. 99% of the time I'm the only one working on it, so that was never an issue before. Usually, I upload the spreadsheet (along with 2 others) to our server at the end of the day. My coworker grabbed the latest versions from our server, but apparently I screwed up and only 2 of the 3 sheets were the current ones.

Since I kinda remember what changes I made, I ended up just copying and pasting the first column in each tab and compared it with the first column in the other workbook to make sure they matched. Since the first columns matched up, then the rest of the columns should be good as well.

Even though this won't happen again (hopefully I learned my lesson), I'll definitely try using the track changes option to see what that's like. This compare and merge feature you speak of could come in handy as well. Thanks for the tips.

Later