Microsoft Excel Tutorial - How to Compare Workbooks

You can find a lot of software that will show you comparisons between workbooks in Microsoft Excel. If however all you want to do is see what is contained in two different workbooks at the same time, there is an option built into Excel you can use. I will show you how to compare workbooks in Excel.

1. Make sure you have two or more workbooks saved

For this example I have a workbook called Book1 and a workbook called Book2 which I will use to compare.

2. Open both workbooks that you want to compare

You would do this by double clicking on the icon that represents your workbook. You should have two instances of Microsoft Excel open and one workbook open in each instance.

3. Click on Window -> Compare side by side with...

On one of the two workbooks, click on "Window" and then click on "Compare side by side with...". If you have two workbooks open, after the word "with", it should show the name of the other workbook.

4. Use the toolbar to compare

This should open up both workbooks in one window where one workbook is on the top in one workbook is on the bottom. This will make it easy to compare workbooks. You will notice a new window popped up which is a small toolbar with further options. There are three buttons on this toolbar.

One of them is "Synchronous Scrolling", which allows you to scroll both workbooks at the same time when you scroll just one of them using the bar on the right side.

The other one is called "Reset Window Position", which allows you to reset the positions of workbooks in case you accidentally moved one or both of the workbooks or if you resized the main window for Microsoft Excel.

The third button simply closes the side by side comparison windows.

I have had to compare two workbooks and I have used two separate windows and had to navigate between windows. This, however, made it very difficult because it was hard to keep track of where I was in the excel file for one window and have it be synchronized with the other one. I have found this built in functionality in Microsoft Excel to compare workbooks to be very helpful for such tasks.

Note: You can also have more than two workbooks open and the "compare side by side" and Excel will allow you to choose which two workbooks you want to compare.