How Do I Use Beyond Compare: Introduction to Beyon
  • Forty things about Beyond Compare
  • Acknowledgements
  • Learn Beyond Compare in 5 Minutes
    • Quickstart: open two directories
    • Quickstart: open two files
    • Quickstart: move a file
    • Text Compare: understand the display
    • Downloads
  • Text Compare
    • How to use Beyond Compare for Text Compare
    • In Beyond Compare, what are unimportant differences?
    • Why no word-wrap ??
    • How to use Beyond Compare to confirm 100% replacement
    • Ignore Trivial Differences, Like Timestamps
  • Git
    • How to use Beyond Compare with Git
    • Do a roll-back to peek at your old code
    • Quickstart: Folder Merge
    • Why merge three folders?
    • Beyond Compare Three-Way Folder Merge Symbols Explained
    • How to compare two commits, both old, in Git
    • Git mergetool: merging three files.
    • How to recover an older version of your code with Git and Beyond Compare
    • Peeking under the hood at how Git does its thing
    • Getting better at Git
    • Find changes since last commit
    • Patches
    • How to configure Visual Studio to use Beyond Compare for Version Control
  • Scripts and the Command Line
    • How to use Beyond Compare in the Terminal
    • How to do an automatic backup every day
    • Write a Batch File That Will Start Several Syncs Simultaneously
    • Write a batch file that will start several text compares automatically
    • TL; DR
  • Table Compare
    • Quickstart: open a couple of Excel spreadsheets
    • Example: finding missing items in a pair of spreadsheets
    • Keys
    • Mismatched Columns
    • Longer example, opening .csv files
    • How to remove columns from a spreadsheet
    • Aligned vs Unaligned
    • Example: List of City Trees
  • Sync / Folders
    • Backup your entire computer (Part One)
    • Backup your entire computer (Part Two)
    • Backup, advanced
    • RegEx Examples: Filename Alignment Overide
    • Scan a lot or a little
  • Other
    • Peek
    • Binary
    • Undo
    • Colors
    • How to compare images
    • Report: Text Compare
    • Report: Table Compare
    • Looooonnnnngggg lines...
    • Binary: How to see the 1's and 0's
    • How to write your first script
    • How to find redundant or duplicate files
    • Minor Edge Cases
    • Shortcut Key
    • How to ignore parts of your file
    • Folder System Context Menus
    • About Evan Genest
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  1. Table Compare

Aligned vs Unaligned

PreviousHow to remove columns from a spreadsheetNextExample: List of City Trees

Last updated 6 years ago

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Table Compare has special features not found in other types of sessions. One of them is the ability to sort the left and right side during a comparison.

Select two lists in your file system. Notice that they don't have to be spreadsheet files. Here I have selected two text files exported from . I then rightclick to open them, being careful to open them as a TableCompare session:

(If you don't have the rightclick context menu, you can do Session->newSesson->TableCompare and then drag in your files with a mouse.)

Popular names of boys born in the US, 1940 vs 1990, aligned but not sorted. The line numbers are created by BC. They are the line numbers in the original file. We see the BC algorithm finding a match at Stuart but then the other names are trapped above it and below it, unable to reshuffle:

With session->sessionsettings->alignment->sortedAlignment turned on we see the lines rearranging. The original file is unharmed. The line numbers tell us the line position prior to sorting. Jerome was line 96 in the left file before sorting and in the newer file Jerome was line 265 before sorting. Highlighted in blue as unimportant differences are names that don't exist at all in the opposing file.

These are not the factory defaults: I reset them for my color blindness.

colors
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