How to Compare Two Excel Files

This article will show you how to directly compare data between two Excel files. After manipulating and comparing the information, you might consider using Look Up, Index, and Match to aid in your analysis.

Table of Contents

Use Excel’s View Side by Side feature

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Open the spreadsheet you need to compare. You can find the file by opening Excel, clicking File , clicking Open , and then selecting two worksheets to compare from the menu that appears.

Go to the folder where you saved the Excel workbook, select and open each file individually.

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Click the View tab. After you open either spreadsheet, you can click the View tab in the top center of the window.

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Click View Side by Side . This option is in the Window group on the ribbon on the View menu and has a two-sheet icon. Both sets of sheets will be included in the smaller and vertically aligned window.

This option may not be clearly visible under the View tab if you only have one workbook open in Excel.
If there are two worksheets open, Excel will automatically select these files as documents to display in parallel mode.

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Click Arrange All . This setting allows you to change orientation when spreadsheets are displayed side by side.

In the pop-up menu, you can choose to have the spreadsheet horizontal ( Horizontal ), vertical ( Vertical ), cascaded ( Cascade ), or tiled ( Tiled ).

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Enable Synchronous Scrpling synchronous scrolling. After opening two sets of worksheets at the same time, click Synchronous Scrpling (located below the View Side by Side option) to be able to scroll line by line on both files and check the data differences manually. work easier.

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Scroll on a spreadsheet so that the screen scrolls through both files. Once Synchronous Scrpling is enabled, you will be able to scroll across both spreadsheets at the same time and compare data easily.

Use the Lookup feature

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Open the spreadsheet you need to compare. You can find the file by opening Excel, clicking File , clicking Open , and then selecting two worksheets to compare from the menu that appears.

Go to the folder where you saved the Excel workbook, select and open each file individually.

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Decide which cell you want the user to click to select. This is where the dropdown will then be displayed.

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Click the cell you select. The cell border will become darker.

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Click the DATA tab in the toolbar. After you click it, select VALIDATION in the drop-down menu. A dialog box will appear.

On old versions of Excel, the DATA toolbar will pop up after you select the DATA tab, and the Validation option will be replaced with Data Validation .

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Click List from within the ALLOW list.

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Click the button with the red arrow. You can proceed to select the source (or first column) which will then be processed into data in the drop-down menu.

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Select the first column for the list and press Enter . Click OK when the data value window appears. There is a frame with an arrow next to it, which will drop down when you click on the arrow.

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Select the cell where you want other information to be displayed.

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Click the Insert tab and select Reference . On older versions of Excel, you can skip clicking the Insert tab and just select the Functions tab to display the Lookup & Reference category.

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Select Lookup & Reference from the list of categories.

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Find the Lookup item in the list. Double click on it, another dialog will appear and you can select OK .

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Select the cell containing the drop-down list in the lookup_value line.

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Select the first column of the list in the Lookup_vector row.

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Select the second column of the list in the Result_vector row.

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Select something from the drop-down menu. The information will automatically change.

Using XL Comparator

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Open a web browser and go to https://www.xlcomparator.net . The XL Comparator website will open, where you’ll be able to upload two Excel spreadsheets for comparison.

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Click Choose File . A window will open allowing you to go to either of the two Excel documents to be compared. Check to make sure you select one file for both fields.

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Click Next > to continue. A message will then pop up at the top of the page letting you know that the file upload has begun and that the large file can take a long time to process. Click Ok to close this message.

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Select the column you want to scan. Below each file’s name is the Select a cpumn drop-down menu. Click the drop-down menu of each file to select the column you want to highlight and compare.

The column names will show up when you click the drop-down menu.

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Select the content for the final file. There are four options with radio buttons next to them in this category, you need to choose one of them to serve as a formatting guide for the resulting document.

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Select the option to easily compare columns. At the bottom of the compare menu are two conditions for comparing documents: Ignore uppercase/lowercase and Ignore “spaces” before and after values. treatment). You need to check both boxes before continuing.

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Click Next > to continue. You will be redirected to the comparison document download page.

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Download the comparison document. After you upload the spreadsheet and set up the parameters, the document comparing the data in the two files is available for download. Click the underlined Click here in the Download the comparison file box.

If you want to do another comparison, you can click New comparison in the lower-right corner of the page to restart the file upload process.

Direct access to Excel file from cell

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Locate the sheet and workbook names.

In this case, we’ll use three examples of worksheet names and locations as follows:
- C:CompareBook1.xls (contains a sheet named “Sales 1999”)
- C:CompareBook2.xls (contains a sheet named “Sales 2000”)
Both spreadsheets have the first column “A” with the product name, the second column “B” with the number sold each year. The first row is the name of the column.

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Create a comparison spreadsheet. We will operate on Book3.xls to conduct a comparison and create one column containing product names, the other column showing the difference of these products over time.

C:CompareBook3.xls (containing the sheet named “Comparison”)

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Set a title for the column. With only “Book3.xls” open, click in cell “A1” and enter:

=’C:Compare[Book1.xls]Sales 1999′!A1
If you are using another directory, replace “C:Compare” with that path. If the file name is not “Book1.xls”, correct it with the name you are using. In case the sheet name is also different, you need to replace “Sales 1999” with the current name. Note: do not open the file you are referencing (“Book1.xls”) as Excel may change the reference you are adding if the document is opened. As a result, the highlighted cell will have the same content as the cell you reference.

Drag from cell “A1” down to the end of the product list. Click on the square in the lower right corner of cell “A1” and scroll down to copy the entire product name.

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Name the second column. In this case, we will call column “B1” “Difference”.

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For example, to estimate the difference of each product, you would enter the following in cell “B2”:

=’C:Compare[Book2.xls]Sales 2000′!B2-‘C:Compare[Book1.xls]Sales 1999’!B2
You can do all the usual Excel operations with the referenced cell of the file being referenced.

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Same as before, drag down the square in the bottom corner to get all the difference.

Advice

Important note: you need to check to make sure that all referenced files are closed. If any files are open, Excel can overwrite what you type in the cell and make the file inaccessible later (unless you reopen it).

Steps

Use Excel’s View Side by Side feature

Use the Lookup feature

Using XL Comparator

Direct access to Excel file from cell

Advice

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