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General discussion

excel errors and closes down while opening xls file

May 30, 2004 9:49PM PDT

"Office 2000 excel 9.0.2720
Hi!

Does anybody know a simple way to how one can count occurrences of a word or a phrase in one excel file. Second thing interesting me is how to compare two similar looking excel files and easily find out if there are any differences and what and where these eventual differences are between them.
These things became acute for me since Excel started giving an error message and closing down every time I tried to open a file I have been using constantly and only made changes with Excel to it. The file was originally 508kb of size, when I opened and saved it using ""602"" office suite the size went down to ca 350kb seemingly with no loss of data, I would like to inspect it though.Thanks in advance. Now i can use it on excel again but i do not no if i have had some loss of data."

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It's called META DATA.
May 30, 2004 10:50PM PDT

Microsoft saves that, plus some undo in their file. So other spreadsheets like Open Office may result in a smaller file.

Do you use META DATA?

I bet you don't.

As to counting words, here's the deal. You can't open it in Excel to start on this one, but let me share that what you may be wanting to investigate is the AUDIT(ing) features. I will not teach Excel, but will point out a feature.

Bob

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Re:excel errors and closes down while opening xls file
May 30, 2004 11:20PM PDT

Word count: even in MS Word there's no way (in the GUI) to count the number of times a certain word (or string) occurs. The best to do: use Find, and manually keep the count. Second best: automate this with VBA code.

Compare: export as a text file, and use DOS fc (file compare) utility. But I think this wouldn't compare formatting or notes, only the pure contents of the cells. Not very good really. Visual comparing the two resulting text files (two Notepad or Word windows next to each other on the same screen) doesn't look ideal either. Custom VBA-code would be much better.

I know of no tools to do it directly in Excel. A google search might reveal something.

Kees