Compare (Excel XP)

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Good Morning All

We have a number of spreadsheets that are very similar and / or newer versions of the same spreadsheet. The problem is that sometimes different versions get updated and you want to compare two spreadsheets so that you can see the differences.

Is there a build in utility in excel to do this?
Is there an external utility to do this?
Has anyone written a macro to do this?

I could write one but I thought that I would check here before I get carried away.

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If you do a Google search for excel compare workbooks, you’ll find lots of utilities to compare workbooks or worksheets. Several have free trial downloads.

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One simple way would be to open both, plus a third and in the third put a formula in A1 like:
=([Book1]Sheet1!A1=[Book2]Sheet1!A1)*1
then copy this formula down/across the range corresponding to the used ranges in the other workbooks.

Any cells in the third workbook with zero values will then represent cells that differ between the other two.

To compare numeric differences only, use:
=[Book1]Sheet1!A1-[Book2]Sheet1!A1
In this case, differences wil show as non-zero values, with the numbers representing the extent of the differences.

Cheers

Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

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