excelcompare

Compare Excel files (.xlsx) cell by cell. Unlike standard table comparison tools, excelcompare captures every cell in a worksheet - including titles, footnotes, and annotations that live outside the main data table.

Installation

You can install the development version of excelcompare from GitHub with:

# install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("SchmidtPaul/excelcompare")

Example

library(excelcompare)

# Paths to example Excel files shipped with the package
path1 <- system.file("extdata", "example1.xlsx", package = "excelcompare")
path2 <- system.file("extdata", "example2.xlsx", package = "excelcompare")

# Compare the two files
diff <- compare_xlsx(path1, path2)

# The result is a tibble with one row per difference
diff
#> 
#> ── Excel Comparison ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
#> Sheet: "Sheet1" | 2 differences
#> 
#> A1: Title -> Different Title [modified]
#> A4: 2 -> 99 [modified]

# The print method shows waldo-inspired diffs
print(diff)
#> 
#> ── Excel Comparison ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
#> Sheet: "Sheet1" | 2 differences
#> 
#> A1: Title -> Different Title [modified]
#> A4: 2 -> 99 [modified]

Features

• Cell-level comparison - Detects differences in any cell, not just tabular data
• Numeric tolerance - tolerance parameter for floating-point comparison
• NA-equals-zero - na_equals_zero parameter to treat empty cells and zeros as equal
• Multi-sheet support - Compare specific or all shared sheets (sheet parameter)
• Clean diff output - S3 print/summary methods with waldo-inspired formatting
• safe_to_numeric() - Exported utility for robust numeric conversion (handles European formats, thousand separators)

Learn more

• Getting Started vignette
• Function reference

Built on {tidyxl} for comprehensive Excel cell reading. Only supports modern Excel formats (.xlsx, .xlsm).