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Version 3.18 Of DiffEngineX Released

Version 3.18 of DiffEngineX was released on 25th July 2022. It now displays the report of Excel VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) macro differences in an integral part of its user-interface instead of using a web-browser. The HTML for these reports is still temporarily saved under C:\Users\Your-Username-Here\AppData\Local\Florencesoft\DiffEngineX\3\temp.

Replace Your-Username-Here with your Windows username.

Version 3.17 Of DiffEngineX Released

Version 3.17 of DiffEngineX was released on 5th November 2020. It will now ignore all non-significant white space differences in Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) code modules if the relevant option is checked on the Options dialog. Now the comparison of VBA macros are handled the same way as for Excel spreadsheet cells in this respect.

Version 3.16 Of DiffEngineX Released

Version 3.16 of DiffEngineX was released on 14th September 2020.

When Compare Folders is selected from under the Tools menu, DiffEngineX will compare all the Excel spreadsheet files (xlsx, xlsm, xlsb and xls) with the same name between two specified folders.

Now in addition to displaying the results in its user interface, DiffEngineX will generate a log file with the path and filename given below.

C:\Users\Username\AppData\Local\Florencesoft\DiffEngineX\3\compare-folders-log.txt

Replace Username with your Windows username.

Hyperlinks Issue With Latest Version Of Excel 365

We have tested DiffEngineX with the latest desktop version of Microsoft Excel on Windows, which came part of Office 365.

It seems Microsoft has introduced a problem with hyperlinks that was fixed in previous versions of Excel. In Excel 2013, DiffEngineX produced hyperlinks which worked correctly under all conditions.

As you can see in the screenshot below DiffEngineX produces a cell-by-cell listing of each difference. Each difference is associated with four different hyperlinks.

The first two hyperlinks link to copies of your two compared workbooks with the differences highlighted with color.

The last two hyperlinks link to the original, unaltered two workbooks you specified for comparison.

The problem relates to the last two hyperlinks. Under certain conditions, these two hyperlinks will fail to work.

To ensure that the last two hyperlinks work, one of the following two actions should be performed.

  1. Make sure that the two workbooks you want to compare using DiffEngineX are already open in Microsoft Excel before you compare them. OR
  2. After DiffEngineX has finished comparing your two workbooks, use Excel to close the two color highlighted copies of the workbooks being compared.

N.B. The bug with the last two hyperlinks is only seen when the two workbooks you wish to compare are not open in Excel before you use DiffEngineX to compare them.

Report Of Excel cell differences hyperlinked to color highlighted workbooks
Report Of Excel cell differences hyperlinked to color highlighted workbooks

New Software Product To Compare Text

Compare text, source code, XML and scripts and report differences

Earlier this month we released a new Windows desktop software product to report the differences between two items of plain text, such as source code, XML, scripts, news articles and books. It runs on Windows 7, 8 and 10.

It has two text boxes on the main part of its user interface which can accept text copied and pasted from the clipboard or drag-and-dropped from the filesystem. In this way it can compare any sort of text that can be copied to the clipboard. It will also compare hierarchical folders of files against each other.

It is ideal for software developers who want to know what has changed in their files over time. In fact any author will need a product like this at some point!

A free 30-day trial can be downloaded from https://compare-text-files.com/.

If you are not using Microsoft Windows, a subset of the functionality can be found in our web-based, online text compare tool at https://www.diff-text.com/.