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

Quickstart: open a couple of Excel spreadsheets

PreviousTL; DRNextExample: finding missing items in a pair of spreadsheets

Last updated 6 years ago

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You have options for how to get your file into Beyond Compare. You can type Ctl-T and then click at (1) to start an emptyTable Compare, followed by browsing for your file from the . Or you can highlight the files at (2) and rightclick compare from your mouse. (If yours is not working check out here: Tools->Options->ExplorerIntegration.) Or you can grab the files from (2) and mouse-drag them over to (1).

The two files will open in a Table Compare session. You should see Table Compare above the menu:

If you don't, try again, this time with Session->NewSession->TableCompare.

Now, with Beyond Compare Table compare open, you will see your files, with many colored stripes and some of the letters perhaps colored as well, if there are file differences.

Near the top of each panel we see various info:

MS Excel workbooks means that BC thinks this is an Excel file, based on the .xls or .csv filename ending. Beyond Compare has a long list of how it opens different filenames. You can see this list, and customize it, at Tools->FileFormats.

Converted means that what you are seeing is the end result of a raw input file going through some kind of formatting on its way to the display panel.

PC indicates a type of line-ending style based on the OS that made the original file. The other possibilities for that are OSX, Linux, and Mixed.

Notice the letter colors. Beyond Compare checks every single letter. Black letters are an exact match, red letters are a mismatch.

Notice the background color stripes. Beyond Compare considers differences unimportant or important, and issues an appropriate color, either blue or pink, respectively.

In the example shown above, the blue lines are

You may have noticed the line numbers are all topsy turvy!

Table Compare shakes the order up to find lines that go together. Among the types of BC session, only Table Compare does this. The line numbers indicate the line position in the original file. By the way, don't worry, BC treats Table Compare files as Read-Only, so nothing is being destroyed in your precious Excel sheet. Beyond Compare is actually unable to edit an Excel file (nor a PDF file nor a Word Doc).

You can turn off this line shakeup, by the way. From the menu choose Session->SessionSettings->Alignment->Unaligned.

Again, don't worry: nothing is being disturbed in your original files. Behind the scenes this is all being done on a temp file that is destroyed when you turn off the program. Beyond Compare cannot save a spreadsheet format file anyhow.

Files in Windows Explorer (left) and the BC homescreen from pressing Ctl-T (right)
The normal default colors for Beyond Compare