Hi All,
I have been working with SharePoint for some time now and came across something new. which is always interesting. When I say new, I appreciate that there may be certain cave men out there who are aware of what I am about to say already, so put that club down.
If you were to launch say a Word document from a SharePoint document library that had multiple versions., you would get a nice integration experience, where it aknowledges the fact that there are multiple versions of the file. You can then choose to compare between the different versions of the file, pretty damn sleek I think.
Can you do this in Excel? NO! That is the answer to that question, sorry, but it is true. Try as you might, you will just get told that you already have a file open with that name already (which is true) and basically, well not open.
Workarounds:
Now you could of course save the two diffrent versions of the Excel spreadsheet locally and then use the side by side view. This is all well and good but falls way short of the experience I just had within my Word document.
Now I believe if you have Office 2013 Professional Plus then you get an additional tool bundled with Office for the very purpose of comparing Excel documents, but this isn’t really a SharePoint thing, just an Office thing. So not the same level of integration.
Current Status: I think that I found a resource online. Sorry for the lack of certainty but since I don’t have the evidence and you cannot always believe everything you read on the net, such as this post, this is the best I can do. So what is this lack of certainty? Basically that this is just the way it is, maybe it is due to the complexity of Excel compared to other Office applications such as Word, not quite sure.
Environments where I have seen this behaviour:
SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010
SharePoint 2013 and Office 2013