5 ms·

Sharepoint is fine if you are only tacking things at the file level. You can't answer stuff like "who changed the formula in E5?" Or even "how long has the form

Sharepoint is fine if you are only tacking things at the file level. You can't answer stuff like "who changed the formula in E5?" Or even "how long has the formula in E5 been wrong?" Some kind of auditability of Excel spreadsheets would save enormous amouns of money and time.

DenisM 18y ago
You can diff two versions against each other. Of course it's not as nice as "blame", which I think is what you want here?
- sctb 18y ago
  That's correct, textually `diff'ing two versions of a file in a bisecting fashion is quite disparate from viewing a document's change history. The idea of auditing and version control ought to be more intrinsic to a spreadsheet or database system than an after-thought supported (poorly) by external tools.
- Tangurena 18y ago
  No. I'm not really looking for blame-generation, although others would. I don't do auditing, but some larger financial institutions do. When investigating bugs (and more than a few times, we're turning into real code something cobbled out of an Excel spreadsheet, so the reference standard is the old spreadsheet), it helps to know why something is different from another, and why the formula in E5 is different than the formula in E4 or E6. It is incredibly easy to screw up formulas with inserting/removing rows with cut & paste. Two sample foul ups: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The-Great-Excel-Spreadsheet.aspx http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The-Great-Excel-Spreadsheet.... http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The-Revealing-Spreadsheet.aspx http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The-Revealing-Spreadsheet.as... I've encountered worse situations in the past than those 2 dailyWTF episodes (as well as seen one old employer's code on that site). Word has a feature where you can see the changes, what was previously present, and who changed it when. Something like.
  - sokoloff 18y ago
    In revision control systems, the "Who changed this line last and when?" is called "blame", so in fact, you are looking for "blame". :)
cubicle67 18y ago
No, Sharepoint is not fine. At its core, Sharepoint is one enormous ugly kludge.

DenisM 18y ago

You can diff two versions against each other. Of course it's not as nice as "blame", which I think is what you want here?

sctb 18y ago
That's correct, textually `diff'ing two versions of a file in a bisecting fashion is quite disparate from viewing a document's change history. The idea of auditing and version control ought to be more intrinsic to a spreadsheet or database system than an after-thought supported (poorly) by external tools.
Tangurena 18y ago
No. I'm not really looking for blame-generation, although others would. I don't do auditing, but some larger financial institutions do. When investigating bugs (and more than a few times, we're turning into real code something cobbled out of an Excel spreadsheet, so the reference standard is the old spreadsheet), it helps to know why something is different from another, and why the formula in E5 is different than the formula in E4 or E6. It is incredibly easy to screw up formulas with inserting/removing rows with cut & paste. Two sample foul ups: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The-Great-Excel-Spreadsheet.aspx http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The-Great-Excel-Spreadsheet.... http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The-Revealing-Spreadsheet.aspx http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The-Revealing-Spreadsheet.as... I've encountered worse situations in the past than those 2 dailyWTF episodes (as well as seen one old employer's code on that site). Word has a feature where you can see the changes, what was previously present, and who changed it when. Something like.
- sokoloff 18y ago
  In revision control systems, the "Who changed this line last and when?" is called "blame", so in fact, you are looking for "blame". :)

cubicle67 18y ago

No, Sharepoint is not fine. At its core, Sharepoint is one enormous ugly kludge.