Spreadsheet compare

Start with the sheets, not the cells

A real workbook has eight sheets and one of them changed. Opening a cell-level diff of all eight is the slow way to find out which. This page compares the workbooks a level up: one row per sheet, with the number of differing cells next to it, so you know where to look before you look.

Once you know which sheet moved, the cell-by-cell view is one click away: compare two Excel files cell by cell, including matching rows on a key column so re-sorted data still pairs up.

Microsoft's Spreadsheet Compare, and why people go looking

Microsoft ships a desktop utility called Spreadsheet Compare as part of the Office Inquire tooling. It is genuinely good, and it has two properties that send people to a search engine: it is Windows-only, and it has never been in every Office edition — which is why "which subscription includes Spreadsheet Compare" is a question people keep asking each other in forums.

This page is not a reimplementation of it. It does one of the same jobs — telling you what changed between two workbooks — in a place where the answer is always available: a browser tab, on macOS, Windows, Linux or a locked-down work laptop, with no install and no license check.

What Microsoft's tool does that this does not: compare formulas as formulas, compare cell formatting, compare VBA macros, and produce its side-by-side highlighted workbook view. If those are what you need, its tool is the right one.

What gets compared

• Sheets are paired by name. Rename a sheet between versions and it shows up as one removed and one added — which is accurate, if occasionally annoying.
• Within a sheet, cells are compared by position and as values. Formulas are compared through their last calculated result.
• Hidden sheets are skipped when the workbook has visible ones, so a hidden lookup table does not pad the report.
• Dates are compared as dates, not as the underlying serial numbers.

Files that should not be uploaded to compare them

Budget workbooks, model outputs, board packs and payroll files are exactly the documents a comparison tool gets pointed at, and exactly the ones that should not be posted to a service that processes them server-side. Both workbooks here are read in your browser. There is no upload, and no copy left anywhere when you close the tab.

If you compare the same two workbooks every month

Then the comparison is not really the job — maintaining a reconciliation is. TableDI is a desktop spreadsheet workspace that runs entirely on your machine: import both workbooks, keep them as tables in one workspace, and build a view that shows the differences and recalculates when you refresh the data. The cell-level tool stays the right answer for a one-off.