SPREADSHEETCOMPARE.EXE

Starting Spreadsheet Compare on the command line

The executable can be started from a PowerShell command line like so:

& "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\root\Client\AppVLP.exe" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Root\Office16\DCF\SPREADSHEETCOMPARE.EXE"

In the Start menu, the program is found under Microsoft Office Tools.

Specifying two workbooks to compare on the command line

When SPREADSHEETCOMPARE.EXE is compared it can be passed an optional argument that names a file that contains the file names of the Excel workbooks to be compared, each being on its own line, for example like so:

C:\users\rene\sales-2019.xlsx
C:\users\rene\sales-2020.xlsx

If this file is named excels-to-compare.txt, the excel sheets it contains can then be compared like so:

& "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\root\Client\AppVLP.exe" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Root\Office16\DCF\SPREADSHEETCOMPARE.EXE" excels-to-compare.txt

Note that after invoking SPREADSHEETCOMPARE.EXE with such a file-argument, the file is deleted by spreadsheetcompare.exe.

PowerShell script to invoke spreadsheetcompare.exe

The following PowerShell script writes the names of the two workbooks to be compared into a file and then invokes spreadsheetcompare.exe to compare these worksheets:

param (
    [string] $file_1,
    [string] $file_2
)

if (-not (test-path $file_1)) { "$file_1 does not exist"; return }
if (-not (test-path $file_2)) { "$file_2 does not exist"; return }

$file_1 | out-file $env:temp/files-to-compare.txt
$file_2 | out-file $env:temp/files-to-compare.txt -append

& "$(get-msOfficeInstallationRoot)/dcf/spreadsheetcompare.exe" $env:temp/files-to-compare.txt

Github repository scripts-and-utilities, path: /compare-spreadsheets.ps1

In order to locate the directory where spreadsheetcompare.exe is found, the script uses get-msOfficeInstallationRoot.

Performance

When I tested SPREADSHEETCOMPARE.EXE (2020-11-24) with two Excel sheets with 2985 and 2991 rows, respectively and 116 columns, I had to kill the program because the program was not only sluggish but effectively froze.

So, for the time being, I have come to the conclusion that SPREADSHEETCOMPARE.EXE is not useable for serious data comparison.

SPREADSHEETCOMPARE.EXE

Starting Spreadsheet Compare on the command line

Specifying two workbooks to compare on the command line

PowerShell script to invoke spreadsheetcompare.exe

Performance

See also