How Do I Use Beyond Compare: Introduction to Beyon
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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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Keys
Key columns should have values that are (somewhat) unique to a given row, such as an ID number. Beyond Compare will give them precedence when trying to align your two tables.

Incorrect

For effective use of Table Compare it is crucial to set the right columns as your keys. The following table of sea ice thickness shows inappropriate keys and therefore poor alignment:
Sea Ice Data, with incorrect keys in the column top

Correct

By rightclicking the column tops we set the keys to a more unique identifier. In this case we chose date as the most unique key. In general, key columns should have values that are (somewhat) unique to a given row. Key columns are often independent variables rather than dependant variables. In the comparison below, date is the independant variable.
Sea Ice Data. Moving the key to column 2 gives improved alignment
Try it out yourself. Start a Table Compare session by pressing ctl-T and then click Table Compare. Or from the pulldown: Session->NewSession->TableCompare. Then browse or use your mouse to drag and drip two Excel files.
When the comparison loads, the rows might not align well. With the mouse, right click on your column tops to make them keys or not keys.
Don't worry: nothing you do will change your Excel file: it is read-only in Beyond Compare. And if you don't like what you do to the columns, you can undo your settings with the button at Rules->Columns->ResetAll.
To investigate the subject of Key Columns, read about SQL and relational databases.
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Example: finding missing items in a pair of spreadsheets
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Mismatched Columns
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