How do I create a readable diff of two spreadsheets using git diff?

You can try this free online tool - www.cloudyexcel.com/compare-excel/

It gives a good visual output online, in terms of rows added,deleted, changed etc.

Plus you donot have to install anything.

Quick and easy with no external tools, works well as long as the two sheets you are comparing are similar:

• Create a third spreadsheet
• Type =if(Sheet1!A1 <> Sheet2!A1, "X", "") in the top left cell (or equivalent: click on the actual cells to automatically have the references inserted into the formula)
• Ctrl+C (copy), Ctrl+A (select all), Ctrl+V (paste) to fill the sheet.

If the sheets are similar, this spreadsheet will be empty except for a few cells with X in them, highlighting the differences. Unzoom to 40% to quickly see what is different.

We faced the exact same issue in our co. Our tests output excel workbooks. Binary diff was not an option. So we rolled out our own simple command line tool. Check out the ExcelCompare project. Infact this allows us to automate our tests quite nicely. Patches / Feature requests quite welcome!