FormulaFence CLI Brings Semantic Diff and Policy Checks to Excel Workbooks
A developer has released FormulaFence, an MIT-licensed, local-first command-line tool designed to bring meaningful version control and review enforcement to Excel (.xlsx and .xlsm) workbooks. The tool compares two workbook versions without executing formulas or macros, detecting changes such as formula-to-value substitutions, broken references, and macro payload modifications. It traces downstream impacts of any changed cell using static dependency analysis and reports results in formats compatible with CI pipelines like SARIF. Reviewers can define plain-YAML policy files to protect specific cells, ban formula overrides, and cap the number of affected downstream cells. The tool was validated against a real-world 18-sheet, 6,623-cell financial model, where it successfully flagged a formula override and identified 36 cells using dynamic INDIRECT references.
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