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Has anyone had any experience with programs that "proof read or compare" 2 supposedly same spreadsheets and determine what the differences are, if any.
This could be useful in our coops when 2 people are the designated spreadsheet creators.
You could use the power of Excel to compare cells to cells whether they are in the same worksheet, different worksheets, or even different workbooks.
For text comparisons, you can use =If(cell1 = cell2, 0, 1). If it is zero then they are the same. For numbers and dates you can simply subtract one cell from another. Then fill down or across the formulas. You can also sum the results and if they aren't zero, go look for the offending row or do an autofilter.
It is fairly simple to do and takes a few moments to do a fast comparison. For more complicated comparisons you can also color or format the cells with a conditional format or use VB to run through the cells.
You could do other things such as save the information in a text file and then do a DOS file compare between two files and direct the output to another file. You can also do a file compare in Excel format but it may find more differences than what you expect.
My project is to post into a huge spreadsheet, seed orders as they come in. There are so many participants (buyers) and even more types of seeds. There will be another person doing exactly the same thing that I am and I would like to know if we both have the same information posted without looking in every cell. I guess proof reading could do the same thing, but I was looking for an easier way since this situation comes up often.
If the data is laid out differently between two spreadsheets then it may be hard to make sense of it unless you agree on a few things such as column layout, standard name conventions, etc. If that is the case then you can sort the rows by any column or a few columns. Then comparing becomes much easier.
How big is the spreadsheet? Have you got thousands of buyers and hundreds of plant selections? The power of Excel can make comparing large amounts of data fairly simple. Back in the day of 486 CPUs and Windows 3.1, these kinds of comparisons could tax a machine and take a lot of time (I'm talking 10,000 rows, 100 columns, and perhaps 12 worksheets). The worst thing was opening and saving large spreadsheets. Now it is fairly routine.
We would both be starting out using the same layout ready for input. We have hundreds of types of seeds and probably will have a good number of participants. It's sometimes difficult to gather the information because of the way that it is fed to us and that's why we need a good way to double check before we actually place the order.
