version control - How do I create a readable diff of two spreadsheets using git diff?

Question

We have a lot of spreadsheets (xls) in our source code repository. These are usually edited with gnumeric or openoffice.org, and are mostly used to populate databases for unit testing with dbUnit. There are no easy ways of doing diffs on xls files that I know of, and this makes merging extremely tedious and error prone.

I've tried to converting the spreadsheets to xml and doing a regular diff, but it really feels like it should be a last resort.

I'd like to perform the diffing (and merging) with git as I do with text files. How would I do this, e.g. when issuing git diff?

Answer 1

We faced the exact same issue in our co. Our tests output excel workbooks. Binary diff was not an option. So we rolled out our own simple command line tool. Check out the ExcelCompare project. Infact this allows us to automate our tests quite nicely. Patches / Feature requests quite welcome!