Blog - page 2

January 28, 2019

How to find Formula Errors in Excel Spreadsheets

Most Excel workbooks contain errors which in some cases lead to unpleasant “surprises”. Spreadsheet errors come in many different flavors: Some of them are easy to spot but others are much more subtle: When you forget to update an external data source for example or when you copy a formula from the cell above instead of from the cell to the left. Or you end up counting some cells twice etc. etc.

January 15, 2019

Compare 2 Excel Workbooks with xltrail

Posted by Felix Zumstein

While xltrail is a version control system for Excel files at heart, it can also be used to compare two (or more) Excel files ad hoc. There are other tools available to do that (see my previous blog post) but xltrail is a great choice for comparing two files for the following reasons:

November 23, 2018

Rock solid financial modeling with Modano and xltrail

Posted by Felix Zumstein

While Microsoft Excel is used across all industries and for anything you can (and cannot) imagine, the financial modeling industry is definitely one of the industries with the highest dependency on Excel. Accordingly, they have come up with a lot of guidelines and tools to structure, format, audit and error-proof these financial models. After all, an error in a financial model can lead to a wrong outcome in a critical decision, like for example a loan approval.

November 15, 2018

5 tools to compare Excel files

Posted by Felix Zumstein

Comparing text files is easy, but comparing Excel files not so much. The fact that Excel is a two dimensional grid with formulas that contain relative cell references makes it quite a challenge. Accordingly, there are only a few tools available that claim to do the job. Let’s see what our options are! In the first part of the post, we’re comparing the features of the tested tools before we get into the details of how well each tool is doing with regards to our test case scenario.

September 3, 2018

Find spreadsheet errors faster with xltrail

Posted by Björn Stiel

Holiday season in Europe and North America is coming to an end. If you’ve been out of the office for a week or two and that business- critical Excel workbook throws an error in your face right on your first day back, you want to know as quickly as possible what has changed in your absence.

August 2, 2018

DevelopExcel Conference in London

Posted by Björn Stiel

The DevelopExcel conference will take place in London on Thursday, 18 October 2018. It will be held at the Microsoft Reactor (70 Wilson Street London EC2A 2DB). DevelopExcel gives you a unique community event to meet and learn from the developers of the major Excel extension technologies.

May 28, 2018

How to git-merge Excel VBA code

Posted by Björn Stiel

Git XL is a free, open-source Git command line extension for managing Excel workbook files in Git. Git XL makes git diff and git merge work for Excel workbook file formats. It works directly on the workbook file and does not require Excel.