What you want to do CAN be done in Excel, but only with a great deal of sweat
and pain. If you have a column that should have a unique entry for each row,
i.e., 27 thousand unique entries in that column, then I'd suggest using MS
Access to do the comparison for you.

You would import both Excel files into Access, giving each a unique name,
After you have imported the data, go into design mode on each table and make
the unque column the primary key for that table. Next create a query that
links the two tables on that prmary key column and pulls out each record
where

table1.field1 < table2.field1 OR
table1.field2 < table2.field2 OR
table1.field2 < table2.field3 OR etc

Be sure to use the primary keys only for linking and don't test them for
inequaltiy

If you do this, you will get a result set that contains all the fields from
table 1 plus all the fields for table 2 where a) the key fields match but 2)
one value (or more) between the two sets of fields doesn't match.

Good luck





"VSExcel" wrote:

Unbeknownst to each other, two of us have been updating a worksheet which has
27000 records and about 10 fields to each record. The changes are not
extensive, but need tobe identified and resolved between the two versions.
The changes could be in any of the rows or columns. I wrote a small VBA
program which ran through 15 minutes for comparing record 1 in Wksheet 1 with
a single column of Wksheet 2. Is there a purely Excel way of identifying the
changes either through coloring cells or using a third spreadsheet? At less
than 15 minutes per column per record. thanks.
--
VSExcel