Re: Comparing two Excel spread sheets

[simon.proctor]

in reply to Comparing two Excel spread sheets

Well if you only have two sheets, one in each. You could just save each out as csv's and do a diff. Any diffs and they aren't the same.

But that iimplies that you want to do a like for like comparison on data and data position.

[Win]

That is exactly what I want to do. Would I use the diff command with MS DOS or something else? And can anyone guide me as to what the best directory to save these files to in Windows would be? Given that the excel spreadsheet that performs this task could be on anyone’s machine in our group (they all have Perl installed now - by the way). Some people use XP and others use Windows 2000.

Update : I think that I can use the COMP command that MS DOS understands.

[blazar]

I'm not really sure about COMP; diff is a standard unix tool, you will find it in the UnxUtils collection. However also take into account the remark I made here: it may be relevant...

All in all using perl with the suitable module to read the csv files and compare them record by record (stopping at the first discordance) will be more robust and shouldn't be terribly expensive from the computational pov.