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XLSX are zip packages. It can be "fun" to version control the contents of the XLSX rather than that binary zip. Most of the data inside is just XML and with a

XLSX are zip packages. It can be "fun" to version control the contents of the XLSX rather than that binary zip. Most of the data inside is just XML and with a good (stable) XML autoformatter you can even see some nice diffs between versions of an XLSX file. A long time ago for interesting reasons of my own (including the fact that I was using darcs at the time and diff/patch-size especially of binary files was directly a performance issue) I wrote a tool called musdex to automate that workflow as (in git terms) pre-commit/post-checkout/post-merge hooks. I offer no warranties for anyone wild enough to use a tool like that in production Excel workflows, but it's a "fun" thing to try.

Izkata 3y ago
In actual git you'd do this with a .gitattributes file, defining a specific executable to do the diff. The docs show it being done with a docx (by converting to text) and a png (using its metadata): https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Customizing-Git-Git-Attributes https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Customizing-Git-Git-Attribute...
- WorldMaker 3y ago
  I've used musdex in "actual git" with the aforementioned hooks. It works pretty well. There are some advantage to the chosen hooks approach rather than a git attributes-based approach especially that it is more "portable": GitHub doesn't need to have musdex installed to view "musdexed" repositories and you get the nicer merge/diff behaviors from standard diff/merge in PRs and commit views and everywhere. Also, while it is much less of a performance boost compared to darcs, git still benefits in some cases of pack file delta compression/optimization due to smaller differences in "musdexed" text/XML files rather than binary containers. I have one public example of this on my GitHub that comes to mind, but it's a particularly weird one because it uses a musdex plugin to extract/combine an already non-binary format. (In this case it was an Inform 7 story.ni file that I just preferred to source control as lots of smaller, column-wrapped "chapter" files rather than one long "book" file of run-on paragraphs. GitHub's cool modern code browser hasn't been taught how to do jump to section for Inform 7 story.ni files, so it is nice being able to browse it as a file tree instead. Similar it's nice to see commit diffs broken down by chapter. I can't install my own Inform 7 plugin to GitHub's website, but I can certainly reshape my repo with a tool like musdex.)

Izkata 3y ago

In actual git you'd do this with a .gitattributes file, defining a specific executable to do the diff. The docs show it being done with a docx (by converting to text) and a png (using its metadata): https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Customizing-Git-Git-Attributes https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Customizing-Git-Git-Attribute...

WorldMaker 3y ago
I've used musdex in "actual git" with the aforementioned hooks. It works pretty well. There are some advantage to the chosen hooks approach rather than a git attributes-based approach especially that it is more "portable": GitHub doesn't need to have musdex installed to view "musdexed" repositories and you get the nicer merge/diff behaviors from standard diff/merge in PRs and commit views and everywhere. Also, while it is much less of a performance boost compared to darcs, git still benefits in some cases of pack file delta compression/optimization due to smaller differences in "musdexed" text/XML files rather than binary containers. I have one public example of this on my GitHub that comes to mind, but it's a particularly weird one because it uses a musdex plugin to extract/combine an already non-binary format. (In this case it was an Inform 7 story.ni file that I just preferred to source control as lots of smaller, column-wrapped "chapter" files rather than one long "book" file of run-on paragraphs. GitHub's cool modern code browser hasn't been taught how to do jump to section for Inform 7 story.ni files, so it is nice being able to browse it as a file tree instead. Similar it's nice to see commit diffs broken down by chapter. I can't install my own Inform 7 plugin to GitHub's website, but I can certainly reshape my repo with a tool like musdex.)