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IIRC, Excel XLSX files are just ZIP archives with a bunch of XML inside. Therefore, if you can come up with a way for a version control system to transparently
by smacktoward 7y ago
IIRC, Excel XLSX files are just ZIP archives with a bunch of XML inside. Therefore, if you can come up with a way for a version control system to transparently look inside ZIP archives, it ought to be possible to version-control XLSX files using the same tools you'd use to version-control any text files, no?
(Though this only solves half the problem, the other half being that even if you can wrangle Git or the like to version files inside a ZIP, Git is far from being a tool that could be considered appropriately usable to dump on the Excel audience...)
- sheetjs 7y agoIt isn't as simple as that. There are numerous equivalent representations of the same underlying content (same data, same styling, same charts, etc) that have wildly different XML representations. You need a content-aware diffing tool. FWIW we've explored that idea in the past, using git textconv to diff spreadsheets https://www.npmjs.com/package/j#using-j-for-diffing-spreadsheet-files https://www.npmjs.com/package/j#using-j-for-diffing-spreadsh... -- it seems nice on paper, but quickly becomes hairy