Different spreadsheets program

Let's say you have sales reports for two months and you want to view both of them simultaneously to understand which products performed better this month and which did better last month. To split Excel windows vertically , click Arrange All button and select Vertical :. As the result, two separate Excel windows will be arranged side by side, like in the below screenshot. If you want to scroll through both worksheets simultaneously to compare data row-by-row, make sure the Synchronous Scrolling option it turned on.

This option resides on the View tab, in the Window group, right under the View Side by Side button, and is usually turned on automatically as soon as you activate View Side by Side mode. For more information about using this Excel feature, please see View Excel workbooks side by side. To view more than 2 Excel files at a time, open all the workbooks you want to compare, and click the View Side by Side button.

The Compare Side by Side dialog box will appear, and you select the files to be displayed together with the active workbook.

To view all open Excel files at a time, click the Arrange All button on the View tab, in the Window group, and choose your preferred arrangement: tiled, horizontal, vertical or cascade. Sometimes, 2 sheets that you want to compare reside in the same workbook. To view them side by side, perform the following steps. It is the simplest way to compare data in Excel that lets you identify cells with different values. As the result, you will have a difference report in a new worksheet.

To compare two Excel worksheets for differences, just open a new empty sheet, enter the following formula in cell A1, and then copy it down and to the right by dragging the fill handle :. A1, "". Due to the we use of relative cell references , the formula will change based on a relative position of the column and row. As the result, the formula in A1 will compare cell A1 in Sheet1 and Sheet2, the formula in B1 will compare cell B1 in both sheets, and so on. The result will look similar to this:.

As you can see in the above screenshot, the formula compares 2 sheets, identifies cells with deferent values and displays the differences in corresponding cells. Please note that in the difference report, dates cell C4 are presented by serial numbers as they are stored in the internal Excel system, which is not very convenient for analyzing differences between them.

To highlight cells that have different values in two sheets with the color of your choosing, use the Excel conditional formatting feature:. Where Sheet2 is the name of the other sheet you are comparing. As the result, the cells with different values will get highlighted with the selected color:.

If you are not very familiar with Excel conditional formatting, you can find the detailed steps to create a rule in the following tutorial: Excel conditional formatting based on another cell value. As you see, it's very easy to compare two Excel sheets by using formulas or conditional formats.

However, these methods are not well suited for all-round comparison because of the following limitations:. When it comes to merging different versions of the same Excel file, the Compare and Merge feature comes in handy. It is especially useful when several users collaborate on the same Excel workbook because it lets you view the changes and comments of all users at a time. To leverage this feature, be sure to do the following preparations:. Allow Excel to save the workbook if prompted.

Turning on the Track Changes feature shares the workbook automatically. Each person who makes any edits to the shared workbook must save a copy. Now that all initial preparations are done properly, you are ready to combine the copies of a shared workbook.

Although, the Compare and Merge Workbooks feature is available in all versions of Excel , Excel , Excel and lower, this command is not displayed anywhere in Excel by default.

To add it to the Quick Access toolbar, perform the following steps:. When all of the users have finished working with your shared Excel workbook, you can merge all the copies into one file.

To point out the row and columns with differences, Excel highlights the column letters and row numbers in a dark red color. At the cell level, edits from different users are marked with different colors. To see who made a specific change, just hover over the cell.

As you have just seen, Microsoft Excel provides a handful of features to compare data in two or more workbooks. But none of the built-in options is sufficient to comprehensively compare Excel sheets, let alone entire workbooks, spotting all the differences in values, formulas or formatting. So, if you need advanced and really efficient means to compare two Excel files, then most likely you would have to use one of the third-party tools specially designed for comparing, updating and merging Excel sheets and workbooks.

Below you will find a quick overview of a few tools that, in my opinion, are best performers in this area. The Synkronizer Excel Compare add-in can quickly compare, merge and update two Excel files saving you the trouble of searching for differences manually.

If you are looking for a quick and reliable method to compare two Excel sheets or workbooks, you will certainly find helpful the following features of Synkronizer Excel Compare:.

To get some basic idea about Synkronizer Excel Compare's capabilities and performance, let's carry out a couple of field tests.

Supposing you are organizing some event and, in your Excel table, you gather information about the participants such as a participant name, arrival date, number of seats, etc. Also, you have a couple of managers in direct contact with participants and the database, and as a result, you have 2 versions of the same Excel file. Okay, let's see how efficiently Synkronizer can compare our two sheets and identify differences between them.

The Synkronizer pane will show up in the left part of your Excel window, where you do the following:. Video courses designed to help you become a better Zapier user. Learn about automation anytime, anywhere with our on-demand webinar library. Share and collaborate on work with your team in Zapier. Manage multiple teams with advanced administrative controls in Zapier. Spreadsheets can do practically anything. They can host your to-do list , help you reach your goals , and lead you to make better decisions.

There's almost nothing you can't track using spreadsheet software. In the 40ish years since spreadsheet software appeared on mainframe computers, spreadsheets have evolved from simple tables and calculators to powerful tools for manipulating massive data sets. But with so many spreadsheet apps, you want to find the one that's right for the kinds of tasks you'll be tackling.

Whether you're looking for an Excel alternative, or just want to know what kind of free spreadsheet software is available, we have you covered. We tested almost 30 of the most popular spreadsheet apps—from the simplest to the most powerful—and here we'll present the eight best. All of our best apps roundups are written by humans who've spent much of their careers using, testing, and writing about software.

We spend dozens of hours researching and testing apps, using each app as it's intended to be used and evaluating it against the criteria we set for the category. We're never paid for placement in our articles from any app or for links to any site—we value the trust readers put in us to offer authentic evaluations of the categories and apps we review. For more details on our process, read the full rundown of how we select apps to feature on the Zapier blog.

For this roundup, we've chosen to look at web and desktop apps since that's how most users interact with spreadsheet data. Some of the apps featured here have mobile versions, but we only considered apps that were accessible outside of mobile as well. We looked for a certain level of competency in terms of available functions and formulas. Basic math operations like subtotaling a range or working out average values are present in all of the software featured here.

Similarly, once you have your data in a spreadsheet, it's likely you'll want to visualize it. All of the solutions featured here offer the ability to create charts and graphs, though the number of choices and formatting options varies. Moving on to nice-to-have features, we looked at the amount of collaboration allowed by each app. Some spreadsheet software includes real-time collaboration, while some includes version control and in-line commenting.

And some have no collaboration at all, but work fine for individual number crunching. Advanced features have also been given priority. That's everything from pivot tables for extracting information from large data sets, to conditional formatting for comparing data and spotting trends, to time-savers like recordable macros. This level of sophistication isn't required of all software listed below, but even some of the free solutions have powerful features like these.

The software has been chosen for displaying a sense of value, regardless of which price point it targets. There is no expectation that free products will stand shoulder-to-shoulder with pricey subscription models. Finally, if you're going to be spending a lot of time in a spreadsheet, it's important that it's easy to use and pleasant to look at. User interface design and overall user experience have been taken into account while reviewing this software.

We've come a long way since 's VisiCalc. Microsoft Excel for powerful data crunching and large data sets. Google Sheets for spreadsheet collaboration. LibreOffice Calc for a free, native spreadsheet app. Smartsheet for project management and other non-spreadsheet tasks. Quip for integrating spreadsheets into shared documents.

Zoho Sheet for a free, feature-rich solution. EtherCalc for creating a collaborative spreadsheet without an account. Airtable for database management. Best spreadsheet software for powerful data crunching and large data sets. Microsoft Excel is the quintessential spreadsheet app. Introduced in , Excel has been a mainstay of the Microsoft Office suite since It's now available as both a desktop application for Windows and macOS, and as a web app as part of the Office subscription service.

Excel contains more functions and features than any other spreadsheet software. It's capable of handling larger spreadsheets, too, with a maximum cell count of 17,,,—in case that ever comes up.

If you're dealing with huge data sets, Excel will handle it better than the competition. In addition to an exhaustive list of functions , Excel pioneered features like conditional formatting and pivot tables. You can record your own macros or use Visual Basic for Applications VBA to vastly speed up your workflow with one-click scripts.

You can give it a name and a shortcut, decide where to store it, then hit OK and record your script. If you're not looking for something that can handle VBA or macros—or you don't even know what those are—you probably don't need to invest in Excel.

The interface has evolved over the years, too, with a customizable Quick Access toolbar for pinning useful functions you need to access often.

The ability to use a native app means that calculations take place on your local machine, rather than having to be sent to a server first. This allows for better performance compared to web-only options like Google Sheets.

Unlike Google Sheets, however, Microsoft Excel's collaboration features are only available with an Office subscription. That'll allow you to work alongside other Excel users in real-time and access document versioning to roll back changes if need be. If you're a Mac user, you might consider Apple Numbers , mainly because it's free—it comes pre-installed on your Mac when you buy it.

Numbers is a capable spreadsheet app with a user-friendly tilt. It offers real-time collaboration, can create beautiful charts and graphs, and comes with enough templates to get you started for most common office tasks. Unlike Excel, Numbers cannot handle huge data sets, and it lacks many of the advanced features of Microsoft's app. But it makes up for it with a simple user interface and an unbeatable price tag. Or, if you want something a little simpler for Mac, TableEdit is a great choice for making simple personal budgets, invoicing clients, or working out math problems.

Best spreadsheet software for collaboration. Google Sheets gives Excel a run for its money in terms of name recognition. And all you need to use it is a free Google account, which you already have if you use Gmail. And webmasters can import Google Analytics data right into their documents, then use the data to build charts or track trends. Similar to Google Sheets, EtherCalc is free, web-based software.

Simply visit the EtherCalc website and click Create Spreadsheet in the top left corner. The site creates a new, unique URL for each sheet, which you can then copy, paste, and share. The one downside with this software is that it was created in The UI is a bit dated and lacks some features. Similar to Google Sheets, Zoho Sheets is another cloud-based spreadsheet software program. But Zoho far surpasses Google Sheets in terms of features, packing in over available functions to date.

Some additional features include pivot tables, conditional formatting, and data validation. You can even incorporate data from external sources with a click of a button.

Zoho Sheets also supports 23 different languages. Zoho offers a limited free plan for teams of up to 25 users with 5 GB of storage per user. The UI is dated and cumbersome in places, but LibreOffice has about features, including the DataPilot tool, which allows you to aggregate raw data and repurpose it in your spreadsheets.

Initially released in , OpenOffice Calc was designed to become an open-source alternative to Microsoft Excel. It was donated to Apache in , and the company has recently made an effort to modernize their software.

Some key features include the Scenario Manager and natural language formulas. This free software is compatible with Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms. Sign up for a free Jotform account to create powerful online forms in minutes — with no coding required. Using one tool, you can customize an existing project management template to create time lines and Gantt Charts. Boasting seamless integration with other productivity-boosting apps like Google Suite, Dropbox, Slack, and OneDrive, as well as collaboration with external users like clients or investors, Smartsheet is a solid spreadsheet alternative.

Complete with templates and tutorials, Airtable is like Google Sheets on steroids. This modern, well-designed platform is geared to improve productivity, offering features and templates that include a project tracker, a content calendar, product planning, and a sales CRM.

Stackby is a collaborative spreadsheet-database tool that enables you to create workflows for specific needs. It combines the practicality of a spreadsheet interface with the comprehensiveness of a database in a customizable platform. Stackby is as easy to use as a spreadsheet but does more than a spreadsheet.