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You can also commit Excel files to a git repo. That lets you get back to old revisions and look at the commit messages. But you're not going to get a diff or gi

You can also commit Excel files to a git repo. That lets you get back to old revisions and look at the commit messages. But you're not going to get a diff or git blame, which is what the parent comment really meant.

Wowfunhappy 6y ago
> But you're not going to get a diff or git blame, which is what the parent comment really meant. You could though. Microsoft (or anyone else creating a "no code" platform) could absolutely build that into a graphical timeline view. Select these two snapshots, and show which cells changed.
- ayende 6y ago
  This exists, at least for Word and likely for Excel as well It is also horrible,hard to understand and not useful for most tasks you will use source control for
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    But is that inherent in any GUI-driven solution, or is it because Microsoft has never prioritized it as a first-class feature? I'd argue it's the latter. It's certainly not trivial (as Git wasn't trivial), but conceptually, version control strikes me as one of the easier things to translate to a GUI-driven environment. And it's something that should be translated, because version control is a major problem even in domains which have nothing to do with code, e.g. graphic design.
    - theamk 6y ago
      It is not clear to me at all how to make a good version control at GUI apps. Let’s start with diff - If this is a text doc, diff seems easy. Show old and new text next to each other, somehow highlight new and old version. Immediate problem: what if you choose to highlight “new” with purple + underline, but user is already using purple + underline as a part of their text. Do you choose a different color? Or just hope it is “clear from context”? Now for spreadsheets: the formula has changed, how do you show this? You can expand the cell to show formulas, but those can he huge, so your document can become unreadable. Or maybe just highlight the cell and let user click on it to see the formula difference - but then you can no longer see the changes at a glance. What about things with no text representation, like conditional cell format? Are you going to come up with text representation just for display purposes, or are you going to design special text formatting dialog which shows “new” and “old” values? There are hundreds of questions about GUI diffs which simply do not exist in texts.
      - neolog 6y ago
        I found your response very interesting. It actually makes me think this is doable because "hundreds of questions" doesn't sound too bad. Many projects answer hundreds of questions.
      - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
        I think these are design issues that you could solve with a bit of work. As an example: > Immediate problem: what if you choose to highlight “new” with purple + underline, but user is already using purple + underline as a part of their text. Do you choose a different color? Or just hope it is “clear from context”? Well, the first option that comes to my mind is dimming the full display, except for those rectangular regions which contain changes. I don't know if that's actually the design which makes the most sense, but a designer could mock it up as one of many ideas to see which one makes sense. (I work at a graphic design studio, so I'm fairly familiar with this process.)
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  It turns out to be an extremely non-trivial problem. The hidden benefit of (text-based) code environments is that problem is well understood and well solved for information represented as two strings of lines. Non-text code paradigms fight an uphill battle for utility because they have to each reinvent that wheel, and many of the solutions are not portable to similar problems. I've used the diffing tools in labview, and they definitely work but I wouldn't want to have to rely on them for a large-scale project.
ryukafalz 6y ago
Well... diffing at least is possible :) https://programmaticallyspeaking.com/git-diffing-excel-files.html https://programmaticallyspeaking.com/git-diffing-excel-files... Git is flexible!
sidpatil 6y ago
TortoiseGit had Excel diff available out of the box the last time I used it. [1] The official tool would be Spreadsheet Compare [2], which looks like it does a better job than TortoiseGit's Excel diff. But it seems to be only available for specific versions of MS Office, according to the website. The best of both worlds would be to write a version of diff-xls.js that used Spreadsheet Compare. [1] https://github.com/TortoiseGit/TortoiseGit/blob/master/contrib/diff-scripts/diff-xls.js https://github.com/TortoiseGit/TortoiseGit/blob/master/contr... [2] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/overview-of-spreadsheet-compare-13fafa61-62aa-451b-8674-242ce5f2c986 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/overview-of-sprea...
- phonon 6y ago
  https://www.xltrail.com/ https://www.xltrail.com/

Wowfunhappy 6y ago

> But you're not going to get a diff or git blame, which is what the parent comment really meant. You could though. Microsoft (or anyone else creating a "no code" platform) could absolutely build that into a graphical timeline view. Select these two snapshots, and show which cells changed.

ayende 6y ago
This exists, at least for Word and likely for Excel as well It is also horrible,hard to understand and not useful for most tasks you will use source control for
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  But is that inherent in any GUI-driven solution, or is it because Microsoft has never prioritized it as a first-class feature? I'd argue it's the latter. It's certainly not trivial (as Git wasn't trivial), but conceptually, version control strikes me as one of the easier things to translate to a GUI-driven environment. And it's something that should be translated, because version control is a major problem even in domains which have nothing to do with code, e.g. graphic design.
  - theamk 6y ago
    It is not clear to me at all how to make a good version control at GUI apps. Let’s start with diff - If this is a text doc, diff seems easy. Show old and new text next to each other, somehow highlight new and old version. Immediate problem: what if you choose to highlight “new” with purple + underline, but user is already using purple + underline as a part of their text. Do you choose a different color? Or just hope it is “clear from context”? Now for spreadsheets: the formula has changed, how do you show this? You can expand the cell to show formulas, but those can he huge, so your document can become unreadable. Or maybe just highlight the cell and let user click on it to see the formula difference - but then you can no longer see the changes at a glance. What about things with no text representation, like conditional cell format? Are you going to come up with text representation just for display purposes, or are you going to design special text formatting dialog which shows “new” and “old” values? There are hundreds of questions about GUI diffs which simply do not exist in texts.
    - neolog 6y ago
      I found your response very interesting. It actually makes me think this is doable because "hundreds of questions" doesn't sound too bad. Many projects answer hundreds of questions.
    - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
      I think these are design issues that you could solve with a bit of work. As an example: > Immediate problem: what if you choose to highlight “new” with purple + underline, but user is already using purple + underline as a part of their text. Do you choose a different color? Or just hope it is “clear from context”? Well, the first option that comes to my mind is dimming the full display, except for those rectangular regions which contain changes. I don't know if that's actually the design which makes the most sense, but a designer could mock it up as one of many ideas to see which one makes sense. (I work at a graphic design studio, so I'm fairly familiar with this process.)
shadowgovt 6y ago
It turns out to be an extremely non-trivial problem. The hidden benefit of (text-based) code environments is that problem is well understood and well solved for information represented as two strings of lines. Non-text code paradigms fight an uphill battle for utility because they have to each reinvent that wheel, and many of the solutions are not portable to similar problems. I've used the diffing tools in labview, and they definitely work but I wouldn't want to have to rely on them for a large-scale project.

ryukafalz 6y ago

Well... diffing at least is possible :) https://programmaticallyspeaking.com/git-diffing-excel-files.html https://programmaticallyspeaking.com/git-diffing-excel-files... Git is flexible!

sidpatil 6y ago

TortoiseGit had Excel diff available out of the box the last time I used it. [1] The official tool would be Spreadsheet Compare [2], which looks like it does a better job than TortoiseGit's Excel diff. But it seems to be only available for specific versions of MS Office, according to the website. The best of both worlds would be to write a version of diff-xls.js that used Spreadsheet Compare. [1] https://github.com/TortoiseGit/TortoiseGit/blob/master/contrib/diff-scripts/diff-xls.js https://github.com/TortoiseGit/TortoiseGit/blob/master/contr... [2] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/overview-of-spreadsheet-compare-13fafa61-62aa-451b-8674-242ce5f2c986 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/overview-of-sprea...

phonon 6y ago
https://www.xltrail.com/ https://www.xltrail.com/