Alex Rivera | Logout

Best way to do Version Control for MS Excel

Asked 2008-09-25T05:31:27.143
183

What version control systems have you used with MS Excel (2003/2007)? What would you recommend and Why? What limitations have you found with your top rated version control system?

To put this in perspective, here are a couple of use cases:

  1. version control for VBA modules
  2. more than one person is working on a Excel spreadsheet and they may be making changes to the same worksheet, which they want to merge and integrate. This worksheet may have formulae, data, charts etc
  3. the users are not too technical and the fewer version control systems used the better
  4. Space constraint is a consideration. Ideally only incremental changes are saved rather than the entire Excel spreadsheet.
excel version-control
Edit
Report

2 Answers

9

It depends whether you are talking about data, or the code contained within a spreadsheet. While I have a strong dislike of Microsoft's Visual SourceSafe and normally would not recommend it, it does integrate easily with both Access and Excel, and provides source control of modules.

[In fact the integration with Access, includes queries, reports and modules as individual objects that can be versioned]

The MSDN link is here.

answered 2008-09-25T05:44:58.343
0

You might have tried using Microsoft's Excel XML in zip container (.xlsx and .xslm) for version control and found the vba was stored in vbaProject.bin (which is useless for version control).

The solution is simple.

  1. Open the excel file with LibreOffice Calc
  2. In LibreOffice Calc
    1. File
    2. Save as
    3. Save as type: ODF Spreadsheet (.ods)
  3. Close LibreOffice Calc
  4. rename the new file's file extension from .ods to .zip
  5. create a folder for the spreadsheet in a GIT maintained area
  6. extract the zip into it's GIT folder
  7. commit to GIT

When you repeat this with the next version of the spreadsheet you'll have to make sure you make the folder's files exactly match those in the zip container (and don't leave any deleted files behind).

answered 2012-07-06T06:48:22.107

Your Answer