I am in charge of several Excel files and SQL schema files. How should I perform better document version control on these files?
I need to know the part modified (different part) in these files and keep all the versions for reference. Currently I am appending the time stamp on the file name, but I found it seemed to be inefficient.
Is there a way or good practice to do better document version control?
By the way, editors send me the files via email.
The answer I have written here can be applied in this case. A tool called xls2txt can provide human-readable output from .xls files. So in short, you should put this to your .gitattributes file:
*.xls diff=xls
And in the .git/config:
[diff "xls"]
binary = true
textconv = /path/to/xls2txt
Of course, I'm sure you can find similar tools for other file types as well, making git diff a very useful tool for office documents. This is what I currently have in my global .gitconfig:
[diff "xls"]
binary = true
textconv = /usr/bin/py_xls2txt
[diff "pdf"]
binary = true
textconv = /usr/bin/pdf2txt
[diff "doc"]
binary = true
textconv = /usr/bin/catdoc
[diff "docx"]
binary = true
textconv = /usr/bin/docx2txt
The Pro Git book has a good chapter on the subject: 8.2 Customizing Git - Git Attributes
Since you've tagged your question with git I assume you are asking about Git usage for this.
Well, SQL dumps are normal text files so it makes perfect sense to track them with Git. Just create a repository and store them in it. When you get a new version of a file, simply overwrite it and commit, Git will figure out everything for you, and you'll be able to see modification dates, checkout specific versions of this file and compare different versions.
The same is true for .xlsx if you decompress them. .xlsx files are zipped up directories of XML files (See How to properly assemble a valid xlsx file from its internal sub-components?). Git will view them as binary unless decompressed. It is possible to unzip the .xlsx and track the changes to the individual XML files inside of the archive.
You could also do this with .xls files, but the problem here is that .xls format is binary, so you can't get meaningful diffs from it. But you'll still be able to see modification history and checkout specific versions.
I've been struggling with this exact problem for the last few days and have written a small .NET utility to extract and normalise Excel files in such a way that they're much easier to store in source control. I've published the executable here:
https://bitbucket.org/htilabs/ooxmlunpack/downloads/OoXmlUnpack.exe
..and the source here:
https://bitbucket.org/htilabs/ooxmlunpack
If there's any interest I'm happy to make this more configurable, but at the moment, you should put the executable in a folder (e.g. the root of your source repository) and when you run it, it will:
Clearly not all of these things are necessary, but the end result is a spreadsheet file that will still open in Excel, but which is much more amenable to diffing and incremental compression. Also, storing the extracted files as well makes it much more obvious in the version history what changes have been applied in each version.
If there's any appetite out there, I'm happy to make the tool more configurable since I guess not everyone will want the contents extracted, or possibly the values removed from formula cells, but these are both very useful to me at the moment.
In tests, a 2 MB spreadsheet 'unpacks' to 21 MB, but then I was able to store five versions of it with small changes between each, in a 1.9 MB Mercurial data file, and visualise the differences between versions effectively using Beyond Compare in text mode.
NB: although I'm using Mercurial, I read this question while researching my solution and there's nothing Mercurial-specific about the solution, should work fine for Git or any other VCS.
Tante recommended a very simple approach in Managing ZIP-based file formats in Git:
Open your ~/.gitconfig file (create if not existing already) and add the following stanza:
[diff "zip"] textconv = unzip -c -a
We've built an open-source Git command line extension for Excel workbooks: https://www.xltrail.com/git-xltrail.
In a nutshell, the main feature is that it makes git diff work on any workbook file formats so that it shows the diff on the workbook's VBA content (at some point, we'll make this work for the worksheets content, too).
It's still early days but it might help.
My approach with Excel files is similar to Jon's, but instead of working with the raw Excel text data I export to more friendly formats.
Here is the tool that I use: https://github.com/stenci/ExcelToGit/tree/master
All you need is to download the .xlsm file (click the View Raw link on this page.) Don't forget to check the Excel setting as described in the readme. You can also add the code to export SQL data to text files.
The workbook is both a converter from binary Excel to text files and a launcher of the windows Git tools, and it can be used also with non Excel related projects.
My working version is configured with dozens of Excel workbooks. I use the file also to open Git-gui for non Excel projects, just adding the git folder by hand.
As mentioned in another answer's comment, .xlsx files are just XML.
To get to the XML directory (which is git-able), you have to "unzip" the .xlsx file to a directory. A quick way see this on Windows is to rename the file <filename>.xlsx to <filename>.zip, and you'll see the inner contents. I'd store this along with the binary so that when you checkout, you do not have to do other steps in order to open the document in Excel.
