We have a lot of spreadsheets (xls) in our source code repository. These are usually edited with gnumeric or openoffice.org, and are mostly used to populate databases for u
If you're using Java, you could try simple-excel.
It'll diff spreadsheets using Hamcrest matchers and output something like this.
java.lang.AssertionError:
Expected: entire workbook to be equal
but: cell at "C14" contained <"bananas"> expected <nothing>,
cell at "C15" contained <"1,850,000 EUR"> expected <"1,850,000.00 EUR">,
cell at "D16" contained <nothing> expected <"Tue Sep 04 06:30:00">
at org.hamcrest.MatcherAssert.assertThat(MatcherAssert.java:20)
I should qualify that we wrote that tool (like the ticked answer rolled their own).
Diff Doc may be what you're looking for.
- Compare documents of MS Word (DOC, DOCX etc), Excel, PDF, Rich Text (RTF), Text, HTML, XML, PowerPoint, or Wordperfect and retain formatting
- Choose any portion of any document (file) and compare it against any portion of the same or different document (file).
Hmmm. From the Excel menu choose Window -> Compare side by side?
Newer versions of MS Office come with Spreadsheet Compare, which performs a fairly nice diff in a GUI. It detects most kinds of changes.
xdocdiff plugin for SVN
You can try this free online tool - www.cloudyexcel.com/compare-excel/
It gives a good visual output online, in terms of rows added,deleted, changed etc.
Plus you donot have to install anything.