Smart way how to compare table rows, vs file versions?

[andydtaylor]

Hi,

I just took ownership of a world of pain spreadsheet and there are multiple versions. What advice would you offer me to manage this?

• There are 4+ active file versions (its quite literally forked...)
• There are 1000 +/- 100 rows
• There are 100+-10 fields. Names are consistent. Mostly columns are added. One example of a column deleted.
• There is an ID field. 10+ rows in one version have "NEW" entered here.

Today I used power query to tell me column differences and added/missing rows with anti-joins. But I need to do better and identify programmatically where fields in a record differ between versions for a given record referenced by ID. In each case a team has with best of intentions made changes to a central store of data. It's going to be replaced with something strategic but needs cleaning up first. I'll resort to VBA if I have to but it will make me sad.

It's been a while since I had to do something like this and honestly I'd hoped there would be some sort of magic in power query to rescue me. Or DAX in the data model, that would work too! I've found out about a list intersect function. Is this a possible answer?

Regards,

Andrew