Can git be used for non-text files?

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Many people want to version control non-text files, such as images, PDFs and Microsoft Office or LibreOffice documents. It is true that Git can handle these filetypes (which fall under the banner of “binary” file types).

Does git only work with text files?

It looks like git is storing non-text files as character strings, so yes it should only keep track of differences. Therefore, any good difftool like meld or Beyond Compare should be able to tell the difference between two images, for instance.

Can I use git for Excel files?

Git XL is an open-source Git command line extension for managing Excel workbook files in Git. The extension makes git diff work for Excel VBA (xls, xlt, xla, xlam, xlsx, xlsm, xlsb, xltx, xltm). Git XL does not require Excel as it works directly on the workbook file.

Can git be used for documents?

So to answer your question: Yes, Git can be used to manage versions of word documents etc., furthermore using gitattributes you can even diff word documents although I’m not sure if this is possible for xls files.

Can Git be used for binary files?

Git LFS is a Git extension used to manage large files and binary files in a separate Git repository. Most projects today have both code and binary assets. And storing large binary files in Git repositories can be a bottleneck for Git users. That’s why some Git users add Git Large File Storage (LFS).

Should you store images in Git?

The whole “don’t store binaries in source control” is set forth for a specific reason: If you have source code that compiles, don’t store the actual compilation, but just the source code. Images and visual assets do not have a “source,” so they should be tracked in version control.

What is a Gitattributes file?

A gitattributes file is a simple text file that gives attributes to pathnames. Each line in gitattributes file is of form: pattern attr1 attr2 That is, a pattern followed by an attributes list, separated by whitespaces. Leading and trailing whitespaces are ignored.

Why does GitHub think my file is binary?

“Why is Git marking my file as binary?” The answer is because it’s seeing a NUL (0) byte somewhere within the first 8000 characters of the file.

How do I link Excel to GitHub?

You can then work with live GitHub data in Excel.

In Excel, open the Data tab and choose From Other Sources -> From Microsoft Query.
Choose the GitHub DSN.
In the Query Wizard, expand the node for the table you would like to import into your spreadsheet.
The Filter Data page allows you to specify criteria.

Can you put Excel on GitHub?

Simple answer to it is, ‘write some code to convert your excel file(. xls or . xlsx) to a json file and upload the content to git. This idea is valid only for a simple excel sheet and not for complex ones involving a lot of math and charts.

Can Git merge Word documents?

Git can’t merge binary files together, so you need to first convert the Word document into a format that git understands. Just as in the previous example we can use Pandoc for that, with markdown as the textual format.

Can Git work for Word documents?

Git and GitHub do commits on pretty much any file type for writing, although it works best with plain text. If you write in Microsoft Word, it’ll work, but you won’t be able to see your past commits on the command line or in GitHub.

How do I get Started with Git and Excel?

Getting started with Git and Excel: Set up gitignore. By default, Git sees every file in your working directory. This has the ugly side effect that sooner or later you end up with a temporary Excel file under version control.

Is there a way to view non-text files in Git?

Git can see that you changed your non-text files, but you won’t be able to get the best of git in that case. With text files you can see what is the actual difference between different versions / commits. That being said, you could try this solution for image diffs in git.

How to merge two XLSX files in Git?

If it’s xlsx, you could unzip them to get ‘normal’ text files. Still, git will see it as binary. What you could do is extract the two versions and merge the changes, using MS Excel, manually. Then commit that ‘manually merged version’.

How to open xlsx file in Git?

As mentioned in another answer’s comment, .xlsx files are just XML. To get to the XML directory (which is git -able), you have to “unzip” the .xlsx file to a directory. A quick way see this on Windows is to rename the file .xlsx to .zip, and you’ll see the inner contents.