Comparison Utility

  • Thread starter Thread starter george
  • Start date Start date
G

george

Hi All
Is there a utility that can compare two text documents or spreadsheet
documents and highlight same/different info?
Thanks.
 
george said:
Hi All
Is there a utility that can compare two text documents or
spreadsheet documents and highlight same/different info?
Click to expand...

You're looking for diffing software. There are a lot of free
possibilities with varying capabilities. Note that these are
designed for text file comparison, so save your spreadsheets as CSV
files or something before comparing them.

I'll just list some possibilities for you to try out:

- WinMerge:
http://winmerge.sourceforge.net/

- ExamDiff:
http://www.prestosoft.com/ps.asp?page=edp_examdiff

- KDiff3:
http://kdiff3.sourceforge.net/

- CSDiff:
http://www.componentsoftware.com/products/csdiff/

You can have a further look in this list:

http://www.foldermatch.com/fmcompetitors.htm

Regards,
Wald
 
Thanks, Wald. That was very helpfull.

Wald said:
You're looking for diffing software. There are a lot of free
possibilities with varying capabilities. Note that these are
designed for text file comparison, so save your spreadsheets as CSV
files or something before comparing them.

I'll just list some possibilities for you to try out:

- WinMerge:
http://winmerge.sourceforge.net/

- ExamDiff:
http://www.prestosoft.com/ps.asp?page=edp_examdiff

- KDiff3:
http://kdiff3.sourceforge.net/

- CSDiff:
http://www.componentsoftware.com/products/csdiff/

You can have a further look in this list:

http://www.foldermatch.com/fmcompetitors.htm

Regards,
Wald
Click to expand...
 
A clunky (sorta) but effective way to compare spreadsheets is to use another
spreadsheet. Using Excel (or the like) you have your two object sheets,
sheet1 and sheet2. The question is what's the difference.

With sheet1 and sheet2 in the same document, create a third sheet and in
each cell that corresponds to sheet1 and sheet2 enter the forumula
=Sheet1!A1=Sheet2!A1 (copy from A1 to the end of the range). When the
corresponding cells are identical the result of the formula will be "TRUE".
When they differ, the result will be "FALSE" (who'd a thunk).
 
CS said:
For Excel spreadsheets, try CS-ExcelDiff.
http://www.componentsoftware.com/products/exceldiff

"george" <[email protected]> wrote in message
Click to expand...

ExcelDiff is not freeware.

AsciiDiff, though designed for comparing plain text files, has a pair of
"Paste"
buttons for you to paste in the contents of your clipboard. So you can
select
the portions of 2 spreadsheets you want to compare (or 2 sections within a
single workbook), and paste each in turn before hitting the Compare button.

http://www.homestead.com/adriancarter/compare.html

It has a few other nice options too. Deals with inserted/deleted rows (these
tend to muck up the synchronisation between files), detects transposed
lines,
allows editing your compared data in place & saving results, etc, etc.

Adrian Carter
 
george said:
Hi All
Is there a utility that can compare two text documents or spreadsheet
documents and highlight same/different info?
Thanks.
Click to expand...

commandline FC command.
 
commandline FC command.
Click to expand...

With a spreadsheet, or anything other than pure text, FC will simply
spew out a never-ending stream of "hex dump" if things are different.
That may be useful to a pro who can read a thousand lines of hex and
compare it mentally to the next thousand, but I found it was beyond
me. 8-) [And, if you don't use the /b option for those sorts of
files, you'll just get a page of "Chinese".]


Cheers, Phred.
 
: george wrote:
: > Hi All
: > Is there a utility that can compare two text documents or spreadsheet
: > documents and highlight same/different info?
: > Thanks.
:
: commandline FC command.
:
Here's something that may work. It's called ExamDiff:
http://www.prestosoft.com/ps.asp?page=edp_examdiff

There is also a Pro version available that is shareware.
 
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