
Ask HN: Is there a collab tool that combines excel with git? - cheunste
At my company, whenever there is a project, we have to use a huge ass excel spreadsheet to keep track of the various items.<p>However, this methodology clearly sucks and there are several problems with it including:<p>- Inability for multiple users to open the spreadsheet without copying and creating another spreadsheet on their local machine. Now we have a multiple version problem.
- Inability to really keep track of change (coworkers usually just highlight the cell of an item that has an issue yellow, or red, or whatever whenever there is a problem and then write up the issue in yet another column)
- Inability to keep track of who asked for the change (who marked this item yellow?) or who fixed it, or when did they fix it.
- It is easy to make mistakes. The current spreadsheet we have for a project is easily 80 columns by 20k rows. Let&#x27;s hope you don&#x27;t have an off by one row error when you&#x27;re entering in something.
- Along with the above, nobody can tell what has been deleted, or added (other than color) because the spreadsheet is huge and even removing five items is hard to see.
- The idiot who started this mess is clearly trying to use excel as a database.<p>So is anyone aware of a tool that can behave similar to excel, tracks historical user changes and see differences between revision (pretty much what git does) and generally make my coworkers significantly less miserable?
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onceKnowable
Google Docs & Apple’s ICloud both have cloud based excel sheet equivalents
that can allow multiple people to edit simultaneously and also track who made
what changes.

If you did this with git, it’d have to be text based so a CSV textile that
could be exported to an excel doc whenever needed, would be the closest you
could get. Good luck teaching your team how to use the command line though :)

You might be better to redirect your effort into lobbying your boss to use
software that’s actually designed for project management such as Trello?

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bjoerns
We have a tool that makes Git understand Excel workbook files:
[https://www.xltrail.com](https://www.xltrail.com) Is that something that
might help?

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cheunste
Holy crap...this might actually be the solution. I'll have to request a demo
and play around with it next week.

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bjoerns
feel free to drop me an email: bjoern.stiel@zoomeranalytics.com

