Excel and CSV Comparison – Case Studies

Users of Compare Suite software share their opinions and best practices about comparing data tables from Excel spreadsheets and CVS documents.

Getting details about differences in Excel

Great piece of software. Adds more features that are lacking in other similar products. The ability to compare different formats is a huge plus while the reporting is the best of any package out there. Getting detailed information about differences in Excel format (Standard version) has made a difference to checking the compatibility of various software databases.

Shane Smalle., ABB., St Neots., Software Engineer.

A note from the developers

Shane, thank you for your comment. We are glad you like the reporting in Compare Suite as we have actually invested a lot of time in making it easy to use. As a software engineer you understand that behind one single button there are sometimes hours of hard work. The fact that professionals like using Compare Suite confirms that it is well designed, even for high demanding users.

You are right about Excel comparison. I’m sure there are tools out there that helps to compare plain text files, but when it comes to office documents, one needs to have some kind of tool like Compare Suite, as Office formats (like Excel and Word) need to be converted before the program can actually compare it.

I saw some people try to copy and paste Excel spreadsheet into Notepad, saving it and then passing to freeware compare tool, but we all understand that this is a one-time solution. For a serious business there should be a software that converts spreadsheets to the comparable text “on the fly.”

Compare PDF, XML, Text and CSV

We are using the features of Comparing Folders, Ignore Line option (not ignore by keywords), XML Comparing (XML is not Sorted but Compare Suite sorts it before comparing) and using command line calls. The file formats are PDF, XML, Text & CSV. We use Compare Suite in both stand alone mode and we call it as part of in integrated regression run to create automated reports.

Paul Geraci, Analyst Programmer, Friends First Holdings Ltd, Ireland

Regardless if you are a developer, Business Analyst or Business user Compare Suite has an intuitive interface. The Reports it generates are easy to use and are presented in a clear manner. Our company has expanded the use of Compare Suite to call it via the command line. This is enabling us to expand it use to integrated testing and analysis. This enables us to detect changes we expect to see in a concise clear manner within the reports. The way that can be used for multiple file types is also excellent. I would recommend this product.

Paul, thank you for such a detailed report about your experience of using Compare Suite. As software developers we understand how automation via the command line is possible only when the product is of the highest quality. Thank you for your confidence in us.

You did a great job automating your compare processes with Compare Suite. For these who just think about using a command line interface I’d like to say that there is an integration manager that helps in creating command line queries. It might be useful, as with integration manager you don’t need to know the parameters, Compare Suite helps to build command line in this case.

Also, as long as you use Compare Suite for testing and analysis I suppose that senior members of your team review modifications introduced. In Compare Suite team leaders can comment on certain lines of the code, and this comment will be displayed in the final report as well.

Finally, if there is something else that you need in Compare Suite, don’t hesitate to send us a message.

Use Compare Suite to compare spreadsheets with trade tickets and cash notifications

Compare Suite as helpful tool for Finance and Accounting specialists:

The system that we have to create trade tickets and cash notifications for our segregated funds currently uses a number of spreadsheets to produce the output we need to send to our fund managers from the daily client trade input. The change management system now requires that we conform to the latest audit requirements where we need to track the changes we are making to the system.

Compare Suite allows us to do before and after compares of the changes and save the change report as part of the change management system signoff process. Compare Suite also handles inserted rows without extra work to sync the files in multi passes so it saves us time over the old methods that we have used in the past.

Search for matching item numbers from one list to another

I find Compare Suite the most extremely useful program on my computer. It has saved me literally hours of time, before Compare Suite I manually searched for matching item numbers from one list to another, because most lists came from different people their formats are always completely different from mine, now I can just load both lists and using “search by keywords” I instantly know what I’m looking at.

Great program and many thanks!

Brigette

Learn more about the comparison of Excel files in Compare Suite.

The view is similar to Excel

I use Compare Suite to find the differences between different versions of MS Office files, mostly Word and Excel.

Chris Xu, Manager, TFI, Indonesia

Your product is perhaps the only one that specifically targets office documents. While the others can compare office documents too, I found the features of Compare Suite were the most complete and most suited to my needs. I like the software’s ability to compare Excel files just exactly as Excel files, not just the usual text comparison. I haven’t yet tried other advanced features such as command line, but I’m sure it’ll be very useful for automating comparison and reporting jobs in the future.