Input from Excel to Beyond Compare

[kirru261990]

Hi, am new to Beyond Compare(BC) tool and wanted to know whether we can send file path of the files we need to compare dynamically from excel sheet to BC.

I have a excel sheet which has three columns. First two columns have file paths and 3rd column is a button clicking on which BC should open and should compare the file paths in the 1st and 2nd column. How can we do this? Is this possible? Can we edit the BC source code?

Am using BC version 3.3.5.

Thanks..

[Aaron]

Hello,

In Excel, does the button you have support calling a command line? If it could call bc3 with:
BComp.exe "%1" "%2"

Where %1 and %2 are the file paths from the first two columns, then BC3 would launch and run the comparison. This has more to do with Excel macro support than BC3; the BC3 part of this is simply the command line support which you can test from the Windows Command Line or Run -> cmd.

BC3 does not support opening and parsing the Excel file, looking for file paths, then opening those file paths. We do not support editing the source code, but I am not sure how it would help. The documentation it sounds like you need is for Excel and creating a macro that triggers on a button press within Excel. This is all still before BC3 has technically been launched. Are you able to get the button press to launch a simple program, like Notepad, with no parameters? That would likely be a good first place to start.

BC3's command line is documented in the Help menu -> Command Line Reference chapter. This would detail the differences between BCompare.exe and BComp.exe, and the parameters that can be used on the command line.