How-to

Spreadsheet How-To Guides

Practical walkthroughs for the spreadsheet and CSV tasks that come up every week, built around real workflows, not theory.

How to Compare Two CSV Files

Spot every added, removed, and changed row between two CSV exports, without converting or writing formulas.

Diff two Google Sheets, or two versions of one, and see exactly what changed by exporting and comparing.

Combine two CSV files into one, whether you're stacking rows or joining columns on a shared key.

Stop Excel from dropping leading zeros, mangling long numbers, and reformatting dates when you open a CSV.

Clear out empty rows from a spreadsheet quickly, whether it's a handful or thousands scattered through the data.

Break a CSV that's too big to open into smaller, workable files, by row count or by a column's value.

Catch structural and data problems, malformed rows, wrong types, missing fields, before they break an import.

Why plain diff falls short for CSVs, and how to get a meaningful row-level comparison from the terminal or the browser.

Open, edit, and process CSV files that are too big for Excel, without crashing your machine.

Repair garbled characters in a CSV by getting the encoding right on both ends.

Drop two files in SheetCompare and see every difference instantly. Free, private, and runs in your browser.