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At my current workplace we have a few workbooks that need to be updated any time that our customer provides us with an update to them. Unfortunately they never

At my current workplace we have a few workbooks that need to be updated any time that our customer provides us with an update to them. Unfortunately they never tell us what changed so we have to go through and redo all the changes that we did previously and apply them to the new workbook. Then we have to test if we didn't mess something up in the migration and whatnot; all in all it takes upwards of a month between managerial overhead and the time it takes to actually figure out where something got messed up. And there's no good diff tool for excel documents which makes it incredibly frustrating to try and find what one cell might be wrong between a working document and an incorrect document. And then VBA for macros is basically impossible to understand because any googling for it returns results for every other version of VB with slight differences that don't work in Excel.

watwut 8y ago
This all sounds like it could be done more efficiently while still using excel. It should be possible to refactoring the sheets so that you can just copy past or write tailored tool to compare cells.
p33p 8y ago
Here are some links that may help solve your problems. Comparing spreadsheets is standard since Excel 2013. https://support.office.com/en-us/article/compare-two-versions-of-a-workbook-by-using-spreadsheet-compare-0e1627fd-ce14-4c33-9ab1-8ea82c6a5a7e https://support.office.com/en-us/article/compare-two-version... Power Query may be of use to automate ETL type processes, which is standard since Excel 2016 and is a free add-on prior: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/introduction-to-microsoft-power-query-for-excel-6e92e2f4-2079-4e1f-bad5-89f6269cd605 https://support.office.com/en-us/article/introduction-to-mic...
- Adamantcheese 8y ago
  Those would be great solutions but we're stuck on Excel 2007 and can't install any newer versions or basically any software because of IT reasons.
  - WorldMaker 8y ago
    Office 2007 hasn't even been Extended Supported for two years now. That seems an egregious information security problem and your IT may need at least some modest sanity checks. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/3198497/office-2007-approaching-end-of-extended-support https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/3198497/office-2007...

watwut 8y ago

This all sounds like it could be done more efficiently while still using excel. It should be possible to refactoring the sheets so that you can just copy past or write tailored tool to compare cells.

p33p 8y ago

Here are some links that may help solve your problems. Comparing spreadsheets is standard since Excel 2013. https://support.office.com/en-us/article/compare-two-versions-of-a-workbook-by-using-spreadsheet-compare-0e1627fd-ce14-4c33-9ab1-8ea82c6a5a7e https://support.office.com/en-us/article/compare-two-version... Power Query may be of use to automate ETL type processes, which is standard since Excel 2016 and is a free add-on prior: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/introduction-to-microsoft-power-query-for-excel-6e92e2f4-2079-4e1f-bad5-89f6269cd605 https://support.office.com/en-us/article/introduction-to-mic...

Adamantcheese 8y ago
Those would be great solutions but we're stuck on Excel 2007 and can't install any newer versions or basically any software because of IT reasons.
- WorldMaker 8y ago
  Office 2007 hasn't even been Extended Supported for two years now. That seems an egregious information security problem and your IT may need at least some modest sanity checks. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/3198497/office-2007-approaching-end-of-extended-support https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/3198497/office-2007...