How to script Excel 2013's Spreadsheet Compare?

Question

I'm trying to incorporate the fancy new Spreadsheet Compare function from Excel 2013's Inquire Add-in, into a VBA script.

The plan is to have a macro to automate comparison between two spreadsheets with predefined names, and to export all the differences as a new spreadsheet.

Without success, to date.

Here's what I've tried so far:

1. Normally, to learn how to automate some Excel functionality, I use Record Macro.
2. If that fails, I look down the list of addable references, to see if I'm missing something obvious.

Both of those have failed in this case. No code appeared relevant to the Spreadsheet Compare, when I recorded a macro (only the peripheral stuff like cell-select appeared). And none of the addable references looked anything like Spreadsheet Compare.

So how can I script Excel's 2013 Spreadsheet Compare, from VBA?

Answer 1

I opened a similar question for automating the Spreadsheet Compare tool from a .NET application, but I haven't found any other way yet than executing it from command-line.

You can do this from your VBA add-in. All you need is to locate the executable file SPREADSHEETCOMPARE.EXE (usually in C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office15\DCF) and to execute it in command-line with an instruction file as input argument.

This instruction file must be an ASCII file with the two Excel file paths to compare written in separate lines.

Answer 2

You can't.

VBA does not cover add'ins as in this case.

Spreadsheet compare is a 3rd party plugin which got swallowed by Microsoft.

If you need scriptable compare you can find those which do for each cell, for each row... kind of thing on the net.

Answer 3

1. Create a runCompare.cmd file:

   REM Execute from command line spreadsheetcompare.exe 
   REM 
   cd C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office 2013\Office15\DCF
   spreadsheetcompare.exe  C:\reportNames.txt
   

2. In C:\reportNames.txt, save in the same line the .xlsx files you wish to compare:

   C:\fileA.xlsx C:\fileB.xlsx
   

3. Execute runCompare.cmd.