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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On this page
  • How to check spreadsheets for missing data
  • In this example we will show
  • How to set the key column

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  1. Table Compare

Example: finding missing items in a pair of spreadsheets

PreviousQuickstart: open a couple of Excel spreadsheetsNextKeys

Last updated 6 years ago

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How to check spreadsheets for missing data

You can check for missing lines and missing fields in Beyond Compare. The sample data for this example can be downloaded here.

In this example we will show

  • how to set the key column

  • how to make column 2 in Table 1 align with column 4 in Table 2.

  • how to ignore columns

  • how to summarize the differences in a report

  • spreadsheets are read-only in Beyond Compare (ou can neither edit nor save changes)

How to set the key column

1) Open two spreadsheets in Beyond Compare. This looks terrible. Nothing is lined up. This is useless right now:

2) By clicking Rules->Columns->rightclick:Edit (or rightclicking the column tops in main view), select an appropriate column to be the key. For our example here, ID is an appropriate key. A key should be a column that exists in both spreadsheets and is unique within its spreadsheet. Make other columns not the key, with rightclicking and unselecting Key.

3) To help the columns line up: Rules->Columns->[arrow keys]

4) Hide or remove columns you are not interested in (by doing more clicking). Don't worry, you are operating on temporary files. Your original spreadsheet is treated as read-only. At this point I would expect a lot of the lines to match up. Why are they pink?? They are pink because I hid the unwanted columns, when what I should have done is delete the unwanted columns.

5) Rightclick in the main view to unhide columns. Now remove them: Rules->Columns->[remove] Now the view looks much better.

The only colored rows are red letters on blue highlight (orphan rows that are entirely missing from one file) and pink highlight (missing field info).

6) The last thing you might want to do is export a list of the differences. Exporting can be done in Text (black and white, old school) or HTML (colored and formatted to look like your GUI). Session->TableCompareReport.

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employee-license-status-missing.zip
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