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Comment by jagged-chisel | Hacker News Reader

> Git was not built for this - ...

But it does have a sort of plugin system to support other formats, right? Does an Excel format lend itself to being supported in this way?

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You can still use 'straight Git', maybe with some PR management system like GitHub/GitLab/... . The difference is you can't rely on the diff to be useful, instead you'd need to provide a good commit message summarising the changes (which you should do anyway!) and then reviewers will need to check out the relevant version to poke it directly in Excel.

But I agree that being able to manage an XLS(X) as plain text and having a proper diff would be incredibly useful. :)

I highly doubt you'd ever get diff for XLS in a general or universal case. That format is so old and crusty that it's only really defined by what Excel will do with it.

XLSX, on the other hand, at least has to follow XML conventions and basic ZIP file structure, even if the open specification for the XML is really now a strict subset of what the current version of Excel will accept.

Git supports extension-specific overrides which enables things like textual comparison of Office files. https://tech.marksblogg.com/git-track-changes-in-media-offic...

I explored storing file types like XLSX as the deconstruction of their zip file into individual XML/etc files. In my cases my focus was DOCX rather than XLSX, and I originally targeted a different VCS than git so I built it as precommit/postmerge hooks rather than git's diff hooks/attributes plugins. I got some interesting results with my tool and it wasn't a bad experience. Just not one I could suggest to novice users (fixing XML in a merge conflict is not entirely fun and very different from say Word's own review tools designed for higher level merge fixing).

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