Aspose.Cells supporting Track Changes

[tkaufman]

Hey guys,

I was looking through the API documentation for .cells and I didnt see any API for reading or writing tracked cells. Does .cells support those operations?

My scenario is this: Programatically generate an excel sheet for a user. The user makes changes in that sheet and then uploads it to a site where the changes are then read through and processed.

It would be ideal to generate the excel document. Setup the "Track Changes" properties on that workbook and then give that to the user. When I process the file after their changes I can process only those cells which the user has changed.

Thanks in advance.

[Amjad_Sahi]

Hi,

Thanks for considering Aspose.

We will get back to you soon for your query.

Thank you.

[Laurence]

We don’t support such a feature. Do you know how to make it in MS Excel?

[tkaufman]

In excel 2003 and above there is a menu item under tools to enable "Track Changes". I thought this would be a good mechanism for tracking through excel what values have changed. So when generating the excel doc that the user downloads I wanted to have "Track Changes" enabled. But since its not an option we're doing the below option:

To achieve this functionality we're currently setting a conditional format on every cell that we want to track changes. Ex A1 = 5 and the conditional format on A1 is "value <> 5 Highlight Green". This way I can loop through each cell and find where the current value does not equal the value set in the conditional format.

We've found that excel runs slow when the worksheet is loaded with over 50,000 conditional formats, and that is creating a poor user experience.

[Laurence]

Is it possible to create a template file with "Track Changes" settings and use it in your application? We will investigate how to make it from scratch but I think it's not an easy job.

For conditional formattings, could you try to merge different single cell into a range? Then it can greatly decrease number of conditational formats.