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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  • Help! My Columns Don't Match!
  • Step 1: Poor Alignment
  • Step 2: Better Alignment
  • Step 3: Best Alignment

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  1. Table Compare

Mismatched Columns

PreviousKeysNextLonger example, opening .csv files

Last updated 5 years ago

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Help! My Columns Don't Match!

We want to compare the attendance for Football and Baseball by city, as shown in the two Excel files below. Unfortunately, our two data tables have different columns and their order is chaotic. Here are the two tables, opened in Excel:

Step 1: Poor Alignment

When you first open these two tables in Beyond Compare, they will not align at all and you will complain that you want a refund on BC!

Step 2: Better Alignment

Go to Rules->Columns. Use the arrow keys to slide the column headers up and down.

Also, you can hide some columns, giving the result below, where the marked in red are now hidden (we hid them because they were irrelevant to our comparison).

Step 3: Best Alignment

By default, BC will select Column 1 as the key column. In this case, we might want to join instead on City. You can rightclick any column heading that you want to set as a Key column. We can now make some interesting conclusions. For example, Minneapolis attendance is ranks better in its baseball league than in its football league. Whereas Dallas seems to like their football team more than their baseball team.

The alignment looks better but the key columns are still not ideal. This is because Beyond Compare is naively using Column 1 to do the "". By default, BC will select Column 1 as the key column. The result looks okay, but not great, below:

join
2017 US Baseball Attendance
2017 US Football Attendance
Blue: The result of using the green arrows Red: The result of rightclicking 'Hide' on the irrelevant columns
Football and Baseball Attendance tables joined by city name.