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I NEED THIS FOR EXCEL! There's been a few discussions about Excel on HN recently and it's such a major tool in so many organizations and keeping track of chang
by aed 13y ago
I NEED THIS FOR EXCEL!
There's been a few discussions about Excel on HN recently and it's such a major tool in so many organizations and keeping track of changes is a nightmare.
Here's a classic example:
- Budgeting model for company with ~10 employees and 8 departments. Model has 30 or so sheets. Tracks all assumptions on the revenue and expense sides. Great model, built well, works excellently.
- CFO goes in and changes the conversion assumptions for the year.
- I go into the model after the CFO, notice that net income increased by $500,000 since the last time I looked at it. WHAT THE HELL CHANGED?
Now take this example and imagine you're on a late night call with the CEO, CFO, and CMO. Ideas and thoughts are going back and forth. "Hey, what does it do to revenue if we change assumption A from X to Y?" ... "OK, I like that. What about changing assumption B from W to Z?" ... "Nah, let's not do that."
At the end of the call I have our updated model that everyone is happy with... but I have no way to easily and reliably see exactly what was changed.
The only thing I currently do is setup a reconciliation sheets on the income statement. For each version of the model, I create a new sheet and copy/paste values from the income sheet then I can do a diff and see what numbers changed. This works well, but there's got to be a better way.
PLEASE FIX THIS.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- knowtheory 13y agoYou know what? I'm gonna start doing this. This is a tool that could help improve journalism in some circumstances. It would help society as well as biz if someone made this.
- bentoner 13y agoCool. We're big fans of what you're doing at DocumentCloud. I originally got into this because I wanted a similar tool for LaTeX (my background is in physics), but after understanding how bad the existing version control tools for business documents were, we just had to start there.
- knowtheory 13y agoThanks, you've picked an interesting niche. Versioning text is an interesting subject, and there appear to be a bunch of tools that are teasing at the problem (many of which get discussed on the Versioned Writing google group), but none of them have really gotten things right yet. A lot of folks have been taking Github as an inspiration, and it's been cool to see what people pick and choose out of the experience.
- IanChiles 13y agoIf you use LaTeX and Git - but mandate that each sentence gets its own individual line, it works quite well for versioning, even if its not transparent to the end user
- jahagirdar 13y agoThere was a script for latex which took two versions of latex files and compiled them to a pdf with changebar's
- ygra 13y agoAptly named latexdiff: http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/support/latexdiff/ http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/support/latexdiff/ Oops, already mentioned below.
- SlyShy 13y agoHey, can you point me to this Google Group? This is a topic I've been very interested in for many years now. I actually wrote this library (https://github.com/zencephalon/Tactful_Tokenizer https://github.com/zencephalon/Tactful_Tokenizer) for sentence tokenization so that I could get Git to work across of sentences instead of lines.
- knowtheory 13y agoThe more the merrier! https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/versioned-writing https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/versioned...
- bentoner 13y agoYep, this is the direction we're going in. One person I talked to diffs two Excel spreadsheets by arranging the Windows to be same size and then rapidly pressing Alt-tab! The latest versions of Excel (starting with 2010, I think) come with Track Changes: maybe that would help.
- bockris 13y agoIt's a blink comparator. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_comparator http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_comparator
- ErikRogneby 13y agoAre you using track changes?
- aed 13y agoYes, it's been a while but I tried that initially. I forget why I didn't like it... maybe I'll give it another shot.
- alok-g 13y agoTortoiseSVN includes ability to show side-by-side comparison of Excel files.
- ygra 13y agoThis is done through a simple script that uses Excel to do so. Same for Word where it uses Word's native comparison feature.
- dleskov 13y agoA quick search for "excel diff" returns: http://excel-diff.florencesoft.com/ http://excel-diff.florencesoft.com/ http://www.exceldiff.com/ http://www.exceldiff.com/ http://www.suntrap-systems.com/ExcelDiff/ http://www.suntrap-systems.com/ExcelDiff/ Are you sure neither would work for you?
- phonon 13y agoThis, (and much more) is available in Excel 2013 http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/what-you-can-do-with-spreadsheet-inquire-HA102835926.aspx http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/what-you-can-do...
- Too 13y agoActually diffing in excel is quite easy to fix yourself with a macro. Google and you will find a few. It's maybe a screen's worth of code. Essentially you just foreach sheet, foreach cell, if diff then highlight the cell. You are working with strictly defined data after all, not some hidden magic markup language like word-documents.
- ygra 13y agoThat would be pretty poor for inserted rows or columns, right? (Essentially showing everything after that as changed)