Testers wanted for Excel comparison application

[mathias.brandewinder]

Greetings!

I am a long-time Excel fan, as well as a .NET developer. I have written a small application in my free time, which allows you to open two workbooks, and compare them to track the differences. I wrote it because in the course of consulting projects, quite a few times, I had to figure out how multiple versions of a workbook were different, an issue which becomes tedious once the worbooks grow large.

I plan on releasing this application for free, as an open-source project, and would really like feedback on it. I have a few ideas of my own on possible improvements, but nothing beats real users to spot issues or suggest enhancements!

So if you are interested and have time, you can download the application at

http://www.clear-lines.com/akin.aspx

Thanks in advance for any feedback!

Mathias

 

[pawan]

Dear Pawan,

First, thanks a lot for taking the time to send me your feedback! Especially so given that you had to do it twice - Sorry you lost your initial message, I hate when that happens to me!
Mathias

Your are welcome.

I think your idea using conditional formatting, and inserting comments, is interesting. I am considering using a similar idea in Akin. The problem I see with inserting comments is that first, it is not always easy to see them,
Mathias

Let the comments be hidden till the user moves mouse over on the comments. That is still good enough and avoids a lot of clutter when there are too many changes (or red cells).

and then, if there are already comments in the sheet, you probably don't want to overwrite them. My current thinking is to generate a third sheet, which copies the "original" sheet and adds comments, and possibly add automatically a macro which can then go over every comment automatically and replace the content of the sheet with the modified content, if the users wants to. Still thinking about it, though - but maybe you can use that idea in your project!
Mathias

In the version I made, the two sheets are compared using a third sheet which copies the values of one of the sheets onto itself and compares the values with the value on the other sheet using conditional formatting and highlights the cell in a different color if there are differences. So the comparison is done in a sheet altogether different from the sheets being compared . So the issue of comments in the original sheet does not arise. Actually your reply got me thinking whether the comments can also be compared. but lets not make it very complicated. Formulae and value comparison is good enough for most uses.

Regarding the value and formula comparison, Akin actually already has that feature, maybe you missed it? There is a combo box on screen, right above the excel-like display, where you can switch between value and formula.
Mathias

Unfortunately i use a company laptop and my company's policies do not allow me to install any software including .NET on to my laptop. Neither do i know .NET. That is why I could not go load your application and preferred not to have it in .NET

Thanks for the input regarding the full workbook comparison! This is also a feature I am currently thinking about. Like you, I considered matching sheets by best % match, and name. The difficulty in my opinion is that you would want the application to do an automatic match which makes sense by default, using these 2 criteria, but also allow the user to match sheets any way he/she wants - without making it all complicated!
Mathias

What I did in my workbook is that at the top of the comparator sheet there are two input cells where the user inputs the names of the sheets to be compared. It is not a tool by itself, i used it in my project workbook. It is a no frills simple idea implemented in excel itself. It only compares two sheets at a time (in my case two worksheets from the same workbook. However these worksheets are two versions of inputs to the model - so there can be comparison on what has changed between the two versions) But the same idea can be taken outside the workbook and developed into a proper "tool" with many more features as you are trying to do.

On the .Net question, I totally understand your position, and I thought hard about it. The issue I have is that without .Net, I lose lots of capabilities. .Net provides very nice user interface, and much faster computations. One option I am considering is to release a "parallel" version as a VSTO excel add-in, which would still require .Net, but integrate the application completely inside Excel, so that the user doesn't have to leave excel, and can do all in one place. Does this sound like an interesting option to you?
Mathias

My position may not change much on the .NET. There will be lot of people like me.The "parellel" version sounds interesting

Again, I really appreciate the feedback. I plan on getting a new version out in the not-too-far future, hopefully in a quarter. Stay tuned, and please don't hesitate to contact me if you have further thoughts or criticism!
Thanks again, and have a wonderful new year!
Mathias

Have a Great 2010!! All the best for the development. Lets hope it gets ready soon and I hope to convince my IT folks to let me install it on my laptop.