[PLUG-TALK] Spreadsheet Comparisons

[Aaron Burt]

On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 02:16:43PM -0700, Rich Shepard wrote:
>    I've saved copies as LibreOffice .ods files, and deleted the 33 sheets of
> graphs so I have only the data sheet, but each one is about 280 columns by
> 200 rows. What I need to do is extract from the latest version only those
> data not present in the original version, and I'm open to suggestions on how
> to proceed in the least painful way.

For comparing spreadsheets, I use the "Edit->Compare Document..." menu
item.  You get an itemized list of changes and a spreadsheet with
differences highlighted in red.  I always get confused by the direction of
the comparison, so be aware, test things and keep backups.

If you expect to receive consistently-formatted XLS spreadsheets weekly
or more often, it might be worth the time to use the xlrd Python module:
http://scienceoss.com/read-excel-files-from-python/

Newer versions of LibreOffice can open and read XLSX files with > 65,000
rows, but it doesn't appear to write them.