How do I diff two spreadsheets?

Posted by neu242 on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by neu242
Published on 2008-09-22T12:54:49Z Indexed on 2010/05/04 22:58 UTC
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Filed under:

unit-testing

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version-control

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diff

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spreadsheets

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dbunit

We have a lot of spreadsheets (xls) in our subversion repository. These are usually edited with gnumeric or openoffice.org, and are mostly used to populate databases for unit testing with dbUnit. There are no easy ways of doing diffs on xls files that I know of, and this makes merging extremely tedious and error prone.

I've found Spreadsheet Compare, but it requires Excel 2000 or later. I've also tried to convert the spreadsheets to xml and doing a regular diff, but it really feels as a last resort.

Are there any tools for diffing two spreadsheets (xls or ods)? I am primarily looking for a multi-platform/open source tool.

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