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Best way to compare spreadsheets

J Norton

New Member
Might be a total newbie question, but sometimes i find i missed a lot of instruction on the basics...in my line of work, i often receive spreadsheets from others that I have to use to compare against the same spreadsheets that im using. Aside from viewing in a side by side feature, are there any better ways that I can take two identically formatted spreadsheets and identify the differences in cell values?
 
How about this way?

http://chandoo.org/wp/2010/07/01/compare-lists-excel-tip/
 
Thank you. Very clever. However, for my spreadsheet, for some reason, its generating false unique values- in other words, its telling me some of the cells in my spreadsheet are different than the cells in the other spreadsheet when they are formatted exactly the same and in the exact same position.


Any ideas why this could be?


Some more info: some of the values that are rendering "unique" are dates. I've actually changed the format of the dates a couple different times to see whether there was some kind of hidden difference, to no avail.
 
Hmm. If you format the cells w/ dates to just "General" are there perhaps a decimal portion? This could also be interpreted as having a time portion (aka, rather than just being Oct 10th, it's Oct 10th, 9:03 AM).
 
I find myself doing a lot of tick off between 2 sheets while trying to reconcile and I often use pivot tables - I often find it easier copying and pasting the columns of data that i need to compare from each sheet into one sheet adding an extra column and putting a name to identify which sheet the data came from so in the pivot you get a row of values and then split it out by the 2 sheets and then just add a formula to the side of the pivot taking one value away from the other and that identifies which are different

I usually have to convert rows to text in case the data from each sheet is in different formats


This works really well when looking at sums of values


Not as quick and nifty as the conditional formatting but works well for what I use it for and in some of my circumstances the conditional formatting trick would not work


I am sure you will get more options from people who are more savy than myself but thought it might be worthwhile sharing my work around - i just joined the forum today and asked another question myself so hoping to get lots of knowledge from this forum


Not sure if it will be of any assistance


Cheers

Karyn
 
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