Find the differences between 2 Excel worksheets?

Question

I have two excel files with the same structure: they both have 1 column with data. One has 800 records and the other has 805 records, but I am not sure which of the 5 in t

Answer 1

COUNTIF works well for quick difference-checking. And it's easier to remember and simpler to work with than VLOOKUP.

=COUNTIF([Book1]Sheet1!$A:$A, A1) 

will give you a column showing 1 if there's match and zero if there's no match (with the bonus of showing >1 for duplicates within the list itself).

Answer 2

I used Excel Compare. It is payware, but they do have a 15 day trial. It will report amended rows, added rows, and deleted rows. It will match based on the worksheet name (as an option):

http://www.formulasoft.com/excel-compare.html

Answer 3

It might seem like a hack, but I personally prefer copying the cells as text (or exporting as a CSV) into Winmerge or any other diff tool. Assuming the two sheets contain mostly identical data, Winmerge will show the differences immediately.

Answer 4

I found this command line utility that doesn't show the GUI output but gave me what I needed: https://github.com/na-ka-na/ExcelCompare

Sample output (taken from the project's readme file):

> excel_cmp xxx.xlsx yyy.xlsx
DIFF  Cell at     Sheet1!A1 => 'a' v/s 'aa'
EXTRA Cell in WB1 Sheet1!B1 => 'cc'
DIFF  Cell at     Sheet1!D4 => '4.0' v/s '14.0'
EXTRA Cell in WB2 Sheet1!J10 => 'j'
EXTRA Cell in WB1 Sheet1!K11 => 'k'
EXTRA Cell in WB1 Sheet2!A1 => 'abc'
EXTRA Cell in WB2 Sheet3!A1 => 'haha'
----------------- DIFF -------------------
Sheets: [Sheet1]
Rows: [1, 4]
Cols: [A, D]
----------------- EXTRA WB1 -------------------
Sheets: [Sheet1, Sheet2]
Rows: [1, 11]
Cols: [B, K, A]
----------------- EXTRA WB2 -------------------
Sheets: [Sheet1, Sheet3]
Rows: [10, 1]
Cols: [J, A]
-----------------------------------------
Excel files xxx.xlsx and yyy.xlsx differ

Answer 5

vlookup is your friend!

Position your column, one value per row, in column A of each spreadsheet. in column B of the larger sheet, type

=VLOOKUP(A1,'[Book2.xlsb]SheetName'!$A:$A,1,FALSE)

Then copy the formula down as far as your column of data runs.

Where the result of the formula is FALSE, that data is not in the other worksheet.

Answer 6

Easy way: Use a 3rd sheet to check.

Say you want to find differences between Sheet 1 and Sheet 2.

1. Go to Sheet 3, cell A1, enter =IF(Sheet2!A1<>Sheet1!A1,"difference","").
2. Then select all cells of sheet 3, fill down, fill right.
3. The cells that are different between Sheet 1 and Sheet 2 will now say "difference" in Sheet 3.

You could adjust the formula to show the actual values that were different.