Excel 2013 - Compare two spreadsheets

A few years ago I wrote an article explaining how to use a third-party tool to compare worksheets in Excel 2010, click here to read it. Recently I wanted to do the same but using Excel 2013 and I was pleasantly surprised to find there is a special tool included with Office 2013 that can do this job. The tool is called Spreadsheet Compare, the chances are that if you are an Excel 2013 user, you already have this tool on your computer.

Using the Windows search (press Win-S or click Start and type in the search box) do a search for "spreadsheet compare", it'll come up, run it and you'll see it's a nice straightforward little program. Just click the Compare Files button and enter the Excel worksheets you'd like to compare.

In my example above I compared two files and you can see in the lower middle window three changes are listed. One is a spelling correction of Woburn and I've clicked on it - then in the two windows above showing the original worksheets, it moves to that position to show the difference.

Also, Spreadsheet Compare can be started from the INQUIRE tab from within Excel 2013. Just make sure you have the worksheets you want to compare open before running it from there.

For more details including a step-by-step explanation please see the Microsoft page, they've done a good job already so there wasn't a need for me to redo it here. Click the following link (last accessed 17/01/2017):
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Basic-tasks-in-Spreadsheet-Compare-f2b20af8-a6d3-4780-8011-f15b3229f5d8