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Comment by IggleSniggle | Hacker News Reader

> no version control, no comments, unconstrained with multiple ways to do something, limited scalability past a certain size or data, no user facing “front end”

I don’t think you and I are using the same Excel...

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I've worked in a Forture 20 company. Literally no one has ever used version control for Excel.

  meaningless_roi_calculator.xlsx
  meaningless_roi_calculator_v1.xlsx
  meaningless_roi_calculator_with_fabricated_hours_saved_v1.xlsx
  meaningless_roi_calculator_v2.xlsx
  meaningless_roi_calculator_v2.xls
  ~meaningless_roi_calculator_v2.temp.xls
  meaningless_roi_calculator_jerry_bullshit_numbers_v3.xlsx
  meaningless_roi_caluclator_v3.xlsx

Which feature have I mischaracterized?

I can’t speak for OP but doesn’t office365 have some sort of versioning mechanism for documents? Through share point or teams or something?

No where near as useful or powerful as Git

Most low code tools I've seen companies drop 6-7 figures on would be worlds better if they had Excel's level of version control.

I've seen low code vendors claim you can do reviews in git... but its an experience not unlike reviewing changes to a generated hibernate or entity framework xml. Its not really reviewable

not having something as powerful as what is generally considered the best is not the same as not having something.

There is a "user facing front-end" as well. UserForms give you customizable dialogs for displaying/prompting the user.

I frankly haven't used vba for a couple decades at this point, but if you dig deep enough its pretty much all there. Combined with sharepoint/etc you can probably get a lot of the UI to be web facing as well.

If there's a good way to version control Excel I'm intrigued.

With sharepoint you can check the file in/out and see version history, possibly with a comment on each versio. But it’s not very similar to version control system. Particularly since formulas and data live together. Better than nothing. (As soon as it gets harder to use, people revert to saving files locally and emailing them to each other... so it’s about as good as it can be really)

“Revision Tracking” is the built-in tool for this, which is about as good as most no-code solutions I’ve seen.

There’s a git extension, git-xltrail, if you want to use Excel with git.

I actually built an external version control system for Excel a few years ago. It is actually a hard problem to solve, as you have to figure out when a user cuts and pastes between worksheets to be useful.

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