The real problem is that even though most problems are actually text problems (or can be represented by text chars) we don't have version control with the same level of granularity for spreadsheets.
The real problem is that even though most problems are actually text problems (or can be represented by text chars) we don't have version control with the same level of granularity for spreadsheets.
Really? What's a database? A spreadsheet. Databases can have version control, backups, etc.
And, what's git? A spreadsheet can be committed to git.
Version control for spreadsheets? It'd be awesome to have on its own, but it's also not hard to add it on top of spreadsheets' existing features.
It is often said that xlsx and docx files are basically zipped folders of XML files and assets, I wonder how effective it would be to add the decompressed forms to git to see and track changes (or similarly for git to show diffs for the files inside a tar/zip
Not hard at all as it turns out. I had to do this a few years back to extract PBI metadata (metric names, queries, data sources, etc.) from of our dashboards.
I hope you realize you aren't disagreeing with me.
That's exactly my point.
It's always interesting to see where developers don't build obvious solutions into existing tool.
You're very right that it's not hard, but to me, the fact it hasn't been done, is interesting thing from a sociological perspective.
I've seen many code editors with amazing git ergonomics built in, never for spreadsheets.
I'm actually working on text only spreadsheet markup that is human intuitive and building interfaces to go with it.