FW Editor: What are your plans or objectives in the near future?
Mart: To produce more software based around interesting algorithms. We hope to release a sister product to DiffEngineX.

FW Editor: What was the inspiration behind creating DiffEngineX?
Mart: The same sorts of processes that align DNA and protein sequences to find conserved and important regions are the same ones that can align spreadsheets rows or even lines in original and modified computer source code programs. Our scientific background exposed us to the former and we applied it to the latter. There are lots of ways to produce the same functionality - some are much more efficient than others - and all use up different amounts of memory and time. We originally intended DiffEngineX to be a text file difference engine, but this field was very full already even a decade back.

FW Editor: How can you describe DiffEngineX in just a few words?
Mart: DiffEngineX finds the differences between Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and any data that can be imported into Excel sheets.

FW Editor: What are the advantages of using DiffEngineX?
Mart: DiffEngineX produces its reports as Microsoft Excel workbooks. A lot of people find these much easier to deal with than a report that can only be viewed outside of Excel. DiffEngineX is reasonably fast, scales well and is reliable. It compares the hidden parts of spreadsheets such as defined names and macros/VBA code modules as well as the actual cell formulas and values.

FW Editor: Which feature of DiffEngineX do you consider to be most useful to the users?
Mart: The option to highlight differences at the character level.

FW Editor: What feature do you plan to insert in the next update?
Mart: We have very recently added the capability to compare the Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) code modules and macros.

FW Editor: Are you offering customer support for DiffEngineX users?
Mart: We do offer reasonable guidance to what the software can do by email.

FW Editor: Any useful tips that you would like to give to the DiffEngineX users?
Mart: If you are comparing rows of data (as opposed to formula or calculation based worksheets) make sure you get Excel to sort them first. Then re-save the files. Start up DiffEngineX and make sure Align Rows and Use Alignment Plus are both checked. Typically Align Columns should be turned off. Hide Matching Rows on the Extras dialog is good to have turned on as it allows you to see just the different rows on the two color highlighted sheets.