Did you try Sharepoint? It does versioning, version control and a bit of collaboration for Excel.

Sharepoint is fine if you are only tacking things at the file level. You can't answer stuff like "who changed the formula in E5?" Or even "how long has the formula in E5 been wrong?"

Some kind of auditability of Excel spreadsheets would save enormous amouns of money and time.

No, Sharepoint is not fine. At its core, Sharepoint is one enormous ugly kludge.

You can diff two versions against each other.

Of course it's not as nice as "blame", which I think is what you want here?

That's correct, textually `diff'ing two versions of a file in a bisecting fashion is quite disparate from viewing a document's change history. The idea of auditing and version control ought to be more intrinsic to a spreadsheet or database system than an after-thought supported (poorly) by external tools.

No. I'm not really looking for blame-generation, although others would. I don't do auditing, but some larger financial institutions do.

When investigating bugs (and more than a few times, we're turning into real code something cobbled out of an Excel spreadsheet, so the reference standard is the old spreadsheet), it helps to know why something is different from another, and why the formula in E5 is different than the formula in E4 or E6. It is incredibly easy to screw up formulas with inserting/removing rows with cut & paste.

Two sample foul ups: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The-Great-Excel-Spreadsheet.... http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The-Revealing-Spreadsheet.as...

I've encountered worse situations in the past than those 2 dailyWTF episodes (as well as seen one old employer's code on that site).

Word has a feature where you can see the changes, what was previously present, and who changed it when. Something like.

In revision control systems, the "Who changed this line last and when?" is called "blame", so in fact, you are looking for "blame". :)

Sharepoint is only really an option if all your users are on Windows.

Not really. You sacrifice some functionality, but you can still use Sharepoint from a Mac.

http://www.microsoft.com/mac/itpros/default.mspx?MODE=ct&...

No Linux support of course.

Or else the ability to save it as text (XML) in a way that will work with SVN so that we can have multiple people working on an Excel sheet saved that way and SVN will be able to merge it. When you try that with Excel, you get all kinds of conflicts in extra data that it's saving in the headers.

Microsoft Word has a versioning feature, under the File menu, not automatic though.

Dropbox?