Spreadsheet Compare missing, greyed out or on a Mac: what to use instead

If you cannot find Spreadsheet Compare, the reason is almost always the edition: Microsoft includes it, together with the Inquire add-in, only in Excel for Windows in enterprise plans – Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise, Office 365 E3 and E5, Office Professional Plus 2013 to 2019 and Office LTSC 2021. It is not part of Microsoft 365 Business Standard, Personal or Family, there is no Mac or web version, and it cannot be downloaded separately.

Below: how to check whether you have it, what to do when it is greyed out or does not start, why it sometimes reports far too many differences, and what to use instead.

1. Who has Spreadsheet Compare

Microsoft's own pages describe the editions a little differently over the years. The most complete source is the plan table in the Office applications service description, which lists Spreadsheet Compare and Spreadsheet Inquire in one row:

A footnote in the same table says it is “only available in the Windows version of Microsoft 365 Apps.” For consumer plans and the web, a Microsoft moderator confirmed that it “is not available in Excel for the web or consumer versions” and “not available as a standalone purchase” (Microsoft Q&A). That is why the “download” links you find elsewhere do not help: there is no separate installer.

Not sure which edition you have? In Excel, go to File → Account: the product name is under Product Information.

2. Open it, or turn on Inquire

Spreadsheet Compare is a program of its own, not a button in Excel. On Windows, open the Start menu and type Spreadsheet Compare; in some installs it sits under All apps → Microsoft Office Tools. In the program, choose Home → Compare Files, pick the older workbook in Compare and the newer one in To, and press OK.

The same comparison runs from inside Excel through the Inquire add-in:

1. File → Options → Add-ins.
2. In the Manage box at the bottom choose COM Add-ins and press Go.
3. Tick Inquire and press OK. An Inquire tab appears on the ribbon.
4. Open both workbooks, then Inquire → Compare Files.

3. Greyed out, missing or not starting

• Compare Files is greyed out. Microsoft's description of the command says “you need to have two workbooks open in Excel to run this command.” Open the second workbook and try again.
• Inquire is not in the COM Add-ins list. In Microsoft's words, “either your version of Excel doesn't include it, or your organization's system administrator has made it unavailable.” Check your edition in the table above, or ask IT.
• “A runtime error occurred during the loading of the COM Add-In.” This was a known bug in Excel 2016, which Microsoft said was fixed in version 16.0.6528 and later. Update Office.
• The Start menu entry does nothing. Users have reported a shortcut that points to a missing SPREADSHEETCOMPARE.EXE after an update. Microsoft documents no fix specific to this; the general one is to repair Office: right-click Start → Installed apps (on Windows 10 Apps and Features), choose your Microsoft 365 or Office product, Modify, then Online Repair.
• Out of memory on large workbooks. Microsoft has no page on Spreadsheet Compare and memory. For Excel in general it recommends the 64-bit version when you run out of resources; the same applies to large comparisons.

Microsoft retired a sibling tool in 2026: Access Database Compare stopped being distributed in June 2026. We found no announcement that Spreadsheet Compare or Inquire will go the same way (checked November 2026).

4. Too many differences, or none

Spreadsheet Compare reports differences “cell by cell”. It pairs the cells at the same address in both workbooks; it does not match rows by an ID. A Microsoft MVP put it this way on Microsoft Q&A: it “doesn't track columns by a persistent identity. It compares structure positionally.”

That is exactly right for a financial model, where B7 should still be B7. For two exports of a table it is not: if one customer is inserted near the top, every row below moves down by one and all of them are reported.

Users also report the opposite problem: rows that are missing from the second workbook not being listed, and some things, such as data validation rules, conditional formatting and notes, not being compared (Tech Community). If you need to know which records were added, removed or changed, compare by key: see sections 5 and 6.

5. On a Mac or without Spreadsheet Compare

View Side by Side. Open both workbooks, then View → View Side by Side, and turn on Synchronous Scrolling so both scroll together. Good for a quick look at a few hundred rows. On Windows it has been there for years; on the Mac, Microsoft's 365 roadmap lists “Enable View Side by Side on Mac” as launched in May 2025.

A formula on a third sheet. Add a sheet and put =IF(Old!A1<>New!A1, "Old: "&Old!A1&" / New: "&New!A1, "") in A1, then fill it across and down as far as the data goes. Every non-empty cell is a difference. Like Spreadsheet Compare, this compares by position, so it only works when both sheets have the same rows in the same order. For a single column, see how to compare two columns in Excel.

Power Query merge (Windows and Mac). Load both sheets as queries (Data → From Table/Range), then Home → Merge Queries on the ID column. A Left anti join keeps the rows only in the first table, a Right anti join the rows only in the second, and an Inner join pairs the rows in both so you can compare their values. Microsoft's merge article applies to Excel for Microsoft 365 for Mac too; the Power Query editor on the Mac needs version 16.69 or later. Step by step: how to compare two Excel sheets for differences.

Google Sheets. Conditional formatting there can only refer to the same sheet; to compare with another sheet use INDIRECT, for example the custom formula =A1<>INDIRECT("New!"&ADDRESS(ROW(), COLUMN())) applied to the data range of the old sheet, which compares each cell with the cell at the same address on the sheet named New. It is positional as well.

Copilot does not replace it either: Compare files in Copilot for OneDrive summarises up to five files and their differences in words (dates, authors, content), not cell by cell.

6. Two exports with an ID: compare by key

Most “compare two spreadsheets” jobs are two exports of the same table: last month's customer list and this month's, a price list before and after an update, the same report from the old and the new system. They have an ID column, and the question is which rows were added, which were removed and which values changed. That needs the rows matched by ID, not by position:

1. Save each sheet as CSV: File → Save As → CSV UTF-8 (Comma delimited). Excel saves the active sheet only.
2. Drop the old and the new file into Calamo's free compare tool. It picks the ID column as the key (you can change it), so the order of the rows does not matter.
3. You get the added rows, the removed rows and every changed cell with its old and new value.

It runs in the browser on Windows, Mac and Linux, and the files are not uploaded. To try it with the example from this guide, download customers-old.csv and customers-new.csv.

Need to check formulas, macros or formatting rather than data? That is what Spreadsheet Compare is good at, and the tools above do not replace it.

Questions

Michal PijákData engineer and the maker of Calamo. These guides come from comparing exports at work: every formula and command is checked against the linked documentation. Found a mistake? hello@calamo.io