Reads two, writes a report
Compare Files
What changed between last month's export and this month's? Point DataTray at two files and it tells you which columns moved, which rows appeared and vanished, and — where you have a key column — exactly which cells changed.
Windows 10/11 (x64) · Free · No account
Neither input is modified. You get a report and a workbook with one sheet per category, which is the form people actually circulate.
What you can do
What people use it for — Compare Files
The jobs this one actually gets opened for.
- Checking what a vendor changed between two versions of the same feed.
- Proving which rows and values differ between a source system and a report.
- Catching a silent schema change before it breaks something downstream.
- Comparing two sheets of the same workbook, or two directories of Parquet files.
- Producing a change summary somebody else can read without opening either file.
What it does
Everything Compare Files handles
Everything this tool handles, and how it handles it.
Schema drift first
Columns added, removed, renamed by position, or retyped — reported before any row-level work, because a column that quietly changed type is usually the thing that broke.
Row and cell differences
With a key column, a full outer join gives added, removed and changed rows, with the changed ones shown cell by cell. Without one, you get added and removed only — and the panel says so plainly rather than pretending.
It suggests the key
No key column in mind? DataTray offers the candidates its own column profiling has already found — the columns that are unique and non-null across the file.
Tolerances, so the diff is usable
Numeric tolerance so float noise is not a change, date-granularity tolerance for day versus timestamp, optional case- and whitespace-insensitive string comparison, and an ignore-column list.
A workbook per category
Added, Removed, Changed and Schema, one sheet each, alongside a colour-coded HTML report you can email to somebody who will never install this.
Sheets and folders, not just files
Compare two files, two sheets of one workbook, or two directories of Parquet — the same comparison either way.
How it works
From your file to the result
- 1
Pick two
Two files, two sheets, or two Parquet directories. DataTray aligns the columns by name.
- 2
Choose a key and your tolerances
Pick a key column for cell-level detail, or skip it for added-and-removed only. Set numeric and date tolerances so noise stays out of the result.
- 3
Read the report
Schema drift, the counts, then the cell-level table. Export the workbook if somebody else needs it.
Under the hood
Formats, limits and defaults
Two files in, one report out. Nothing is written back to either side.
- Compares
- Two files, two sheets of one workbook, or two Parquet directories
- With a key
- Added, removed and changed rows, with changes shown cell by cell
- Without a key
- Added and removed rows only — stated plainly rather than approximated
- Tolerances
- Numeric, date granularity, case and whitespace insensitivity, ignore-column list
- Outputs
- Comparison Report (HTML) and an .xlsx with one sheet per category
The smallest tile in the belt, and the most separable. It stays on its own because two-file input is a different way of thinking from everything else here, and its report is structurally unlike the others.
The rest of the belt
The other four tools
Questions
Compare Files, answered
Get it free — Compare Files
Compare Files ships in DataTray, free for Windows 10 and 11. No account, and nothing uploads.
Windows 10/11 (x64) · Free · No account