You can find the complete list of episodes, and a link to the source code of the Excel VSTO add-in tutorial here.

In the second part of this series, we will generate a comparison between two open spreadsheets, and create a user interface to navigate between the differences, and reconcile them if need be.

For today, let’s assume that the add-in has already figured out what the differences are, and build first a user interface that allows the user to navigate to the cells that have differences. In later posts, we will focus on actually generating these differences.

To achieve this, I will leverage the Goto method of Excel. Application.Goto(object reference, object scroll) will navigate to the range defined by reference. If scroll is set to true, it will force the window to scroll so that the range is the upper-left corner, otherwise it will scroll only if necessary.

This is a good starting point for design. A spreadsheet comparison will be a collection of differences, and each difference should map to a cell. One approach is to store the row and column of each difference, so that from a Difference object, we can retrieve the corresponding range, and go to it:

private void NavigateToDifference(Difference difference)
{
   var row = difference.Row;
   var column = difference.Column;
   var activeSheet = (Excel.Worksheet)this.excel.ActiveSheet;
   var differenceLocation = activeSheet.Cells[row, column];
   this.excel.Goto(differenceLocation, Type.Missing);
}

More...