Excel audit trail
Prove who changed what, when — and who approved it
When a number is wrong or a row is marked “approved,” you need evidence, not a guess. SheetDelta keeps a complete, exportable audit trail for critical workbooks: every version, every change, every comment, every sign-off, tied to a real author.
The cell says “approved.” Who typed it?
An audit team opens a reporting workbook and finds a status column where rows read
approved. Reasonable — until someone asks who
approved them, and when, and against which version of the numbers. Excel can’t say. The cell
holds the word, but not the act. There is no record that anyone reviewed anything; there is
just text that someone, at some point, was able to type.
The same gap shows up the moment a figure turns out to be wrong. SharePoint can tell you the
file changed and who saved it, but not which cell moved or who moved it. You can roll
Q3_model_final_v2.xlsx back to last week, and still have no
idea what was different about last week. An audit trail is supposed to answer exactly these
questions — and for most spreadsheets, nothing is keeping one.
What a real audit trail records
Not a list of timestamps. A defensible record of every change and every decision, attached to the cell and the person.
Every version, kept and diffable
Cell-level who and what
Comments and decisions, in line
Approvals that are recorded, not assumed
What each layer can actually prove
Excel stores the workbook. SharePoint stores the file. Neither stores the evidence.
| Excel alone | SharePoint history | SheetDelta | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who changed a specific cell | — | File-level only | |
| What the value was before | — | — | |
| Approval recorded as an event | — | — | |
| Comment thread tied to the change | Per-cell notes | — | |
| Compare two arbitrary versions | — | — | |
| Tamper-evident, exportable record | — | — | |
| Survives a file emailed outside the tenant | — | — |
SharePoint and OneDrive version history are a genuine backup, and you should keep them. They record who saved each file — not who changed each cell, and not who approved it.
An approval should be an event, not a word in a cell
The difference between “we think this was reviewed” and “this was reviewed” is a recorded sign-off. In SheetDelta, an approval names the person, the moment, and the exact set of changes it covers. If a control file requires two distinct reviewers, the trail shows both — and shows that the author didn’t approve their own work.
That’s the version of an audit trail that holds up when finance, internal audit, or an external examiner is the one reading it. For the workbooks where it matters, you can also require that sign-off before a change is distributed — see how the hosted platform handles review and approval gates, or how this fits a broader spreadsheet governance approach.
Frequently asked questions
Does Excel have a built-in audit trail?
How do I create an audit trail for an Excel workbook?
Is the audit trail tamper-evident?
Can I export it for auditors?
Does it work across two versions that were never connected?
Related
Right-sized change control for the files that matter.
History, comparisons, review, and sign-off for teams.
An audit trail for forecasts and board models.
Why “last modified by” isn’t a who-changed-what record.
What the built-in features can and can’t record.
Where the audit trail, review, and sign-off live.
Make every change defensible
Connect a SharePoint library and start building an exportable trail of who changed what, when, and who approved it.