Column Width - Excel Worksheet Compare

[Vern]

I am comparing two Excel worksheets with 9 columns. Some of the columns contain long text entries. Beyond Compare (ver 3.1.11) opens the side by side or over under comparison by sizing each column to fit the largest entry. That requires me to do lots of scrolling left and right to see the columns.

I manually resized each column to show all columns on the same screen. Most of the data in each column is truncated, but that is fine. I am happy to see only the first 10 characters as long as I can see all of the columns without scrolling. However the manual resizing is time-consuming.

Does BC3 offer a method to select multiple columns and then resize the columns to the same small size? I have search BC3 and cannot find a solution. The only option that BC3 offers is "Resize columns to fit" when we really need "Resize to a specific size".

Finally I saved the session with the columns resized to a small width. However when I reloaded the sessions, all columns were very wide again.

Can anything be done?

[Aaron]

Hello Vern,

Unfortunately, we do not currently support saving the column widths. It is on our Customer Wishlist to save them as part of the Session information.

As a side note, all BC3.x updates are free for 3.x users. You are welcome to update to our latest release (3.2.4) from the Help menu -> Check for Updates, or from our website:
http://www.scootersoftware.com/download.php

[Tim]

Does BC3 offer a method to select multiple columns and then resize the columns to the same small size?

Sorry, BC does not have this feature. We'll add it to the wishlist.

[Vern]

Aaron,

Even worse than not saving column widths as part of the session, BC3 does not even respect column width changes during a session. I manually changed all column widths to small values. However any change - such as assigning a key column or making a column unimportant - causes the column widths to resize to their original large values. I do hope that you can move column widths to a high priority on the wish list.


I updated to 3.2.4 as you suggested.

[Michael Bulgrien]

I agree.

[Vern]

I installed the latest update last week. Unfortunately, controlling column widths when comparing two Excel spreadsheets still is not possible. After carefully arranging all column widths, the slightest change immediately causes all column widths to revert to the default. Fixing column widths has been on the wishlist for at least 18 months.

Will this problem be fixed in the next update?

[Aaron]

Hello Vern,

We're sorry. This is something that is still on our Wishlist, but is not something we can commit to in 3.3.6. I'll certainly bump this up again; our developers have been pretty busy with a few larger projects and haven't been able to work on as many feature requests.

The only workaround we have right now is a combination of the View menu -> Columns dialog (to outright hide columns you don't want to see) and View menu -> Resize to Fit.