Comparison settings

Tune the comparison to the model in front of you. Tolerance, what content to compare, how to align shifted rows, which financial metrics matter, and how output attribution behaves are all configurable — and saved per user so your preferences stick.

Where to find it

ModelXcel Pro tab → Compare group → dropdown → Settings…. The dialog only edits configuration — it doesn’t run a comparison. The same settings are also offered inline on the Compare Workbooks and Compare Sheets selection dialogs.

What you can configure

The settings group into a few areas (defaults shown in parentheses):

What to compare

  • Compare content — values, formulas, or both (both).
  • Compare formatting (on) — font, color, border, number format, alignment, conditional formatting.
  • Compare named ranges (on) and data validation (on).
  • Compare comments (off) — legacy cell comments only; threaded comments are out of scope.
  • Ignore hidden sheets (on) — skip sheets hidden in either workbook.

Tolerance & noise

  • Numeric tolerance (0.000001) — numeric differences smaller than this aren’t reported as value changes.
  • Ignore whitespace in formulas (on) and ignore absolute/relative reference differences (off).
  • Compare formulas in R1C1 (off) — compare formulas by their R1C1 form so a filled formula reads identically across a row, making the one cell that truly differs obvious.
  • Group identical changes (on) — collapse the same R1C1 change across many cells into one entry.

Alignment

  • Align rows / columns (on) and smart alignment (on) — match shifted rows/columns so inserts and deletes don’t cascade into false differences.
  • Alignment anchor columns (A, B) and an alignment threshold (80) — which columns to align on and how strict the match must be.

Financial-model analysis

  • Perform financial-model analysis (on) and analyze metric impact (on).
  • Key metrics & keywords — the labels scanned to recognize metric cells (NPV, IRR, EBITDA, DSCR, WACC, ROI, cash flow, FCF…).
  • Per-metric sensitivity thresholds — how big a move counts as significant for each metric (e.g. a 0.5% IRR swing).
  • Analysis level — key outputs only, key outputs and their inputs (default), or comprehensive.

Output attribution (Material Change Intelligence)

  • Enable output attribution (on).
  • Max drivers (8) — how many ranked drivers an explanation includes.
  • Refinement budget (5 seconds) — the soft time budget for sensitivity-backed refinement.
  • Output selection mode — suggest detected key outputs first (default), only suggested outputs, or manual only.

Performance

  • Use parallel analysis (on) and chunk size (1000).
  • Skip recalculation (off) — skip the pre-comparison recalculation when you know both workbooks are already fully calculated.

Where settings are stored

Settings persist as a JSON file at %APPDATA%\ModelxcelPro\comparison-settings.json, per Windows user. They load on open and save when you confirm the dialog; if the file is missing or unreadable, the built-in defaults are used.

Compare to Previous Version uses the defaults

Compare to Previous Version runs with the built-in default settings and does not read this saved file. To apply a specific tolerance or scope to a version diff, run it through Compare Workbooks instead.

Caveats

  • Per-user, per-machine. Settings live in your Windows profile, not in the workbook, so they don’t travel with a shared file.
  • Defaults are sensible for most models — the main knobs to revisit are numeric tolerance, whether to compare formatting, and the alignment threshold on heavily restructured sheets.

Related