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

Example: List of City Trees

In this example we will open a very large table of public trees in Wisconsin and sort it.

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Last updated 6 years ago

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We have two Excel spreadsheets of city-planted trees. We will attempt to find days when the same species of tree was planted in both of our lists.

Our strategy for doing this will be to set date as a key column and then remove all of the other columns using the rules button.

We are going to choose a key column and also, choose some columns to ignore or delete.

  • First, make the view wider: view->overAndUnderLayout

  • You can choose one or more key columns fromrulesButton->columnsChoose date in this example.

  • Still at rulesButton->columns->editdo a delete of many unimportant columns. Don't worry, the original file will be unharmed. Keep deleting until all that remains is your Address[key] column and a few other columns of interest.

Note that Beyond Compare is in Read-Only mode for Microsoft files (Excel & word) and PDF files. We cannot alter the file nor save our work. We can export the report though! Use Session->TableCompareReport.

How the file looks when it first opens. It has 17 columns. We want to only look at two. Rightclick the column top you want to be your unique key. Then in RulesButton->Columns start doing 'remove' on the unwanted columns.
How NOT to choose a key: Springfield is an example of a bad key. It is far from unique
This is from: Session->SessionSettings->Columns Keep rightclicking and removing until only your interesting columns remain. Note that each row here is a 'column' in your spreadsheet.
Result: Using date as the key, we found a day when both lists planted the same species, a Magnolia, one August 21st.