Blog - page 3

April 10, 2018

Make Git Tower work with Spreadsheet Compare

Git Tower is a graphical user interface-based Git client and an interesting alternative to the command line. Git Tower is very customisable to your individual needs; it supports a set of third party diff tools (such as Beyond Compare) out of the box but you can also make it work with literally any diff tool. This makes Git Tower an ideal tool for version-controlling Excel workbook with Git. In this article, you’ll learn how to configure Git Tower to use Microsoft Spreadsheet Compare as a custom diff tool.

March 23, 2018

Git XL: An open-source Git command-line extension for Excel files

Posted by Björn Stiel

Git can be tweaked to make it play nicely with Excel workbook files (that is, to be able to show diffs). Pre-commit hoooks can be set-up to automatically export the workbook’s VBA code as stand-alone .bas files on each commit. And Microsoft’s Spreadsheet Compare can be used as a custom differ for Excel workbook file changes.

January 26, 2018

Quick Guide: Git Large File Storage (LFS) for Excel

Posted by Björn Stiel

As a distributed version control system, Git always copies down the entire repository history to the client when you do a git clone or git fetch. For repositories containing large files and/or long commit histories, this clone process can take a long time, as every file version that ever existed has to be downloaded.

January 4, 2018

3 steps to make Spreadsheet Compare work with git diff

Posted by Björn Stiel

For Git, Excel workbooks are just binary files. This means they cannot be diffed via git diff. In this blog post, we hook up Microsoft Office’s Spreadsheet Compare to git diff to create meaningful workbook comparisons.

December 13, 2017

Getting started with Git and Excel: Set up gitignore

Posted by Björn Stiel

By default, Git sees every file in your working directory. This has the ugly side effect that sooner or later you end up with a temporary Excel file under version control.

November 16, 2017

Git workflow for Excel

Posted by Björn Stiel

This guide presents a simple recipe for how to use Git for Excel workbooks to support small Excel teams in their existing workflow and simplify collaboration.

November 8, 2017

xlwings is now managed with Git on xltrail!

Posted by Felix Zumstein

Our most popular open-source project is clearly xlwings, an Excel add-in that allows you to write user defined functions and macros in Python instead of VBA.