I've been asked to help our QA person compare some before and after Excel reports. The reports are just lists of account codes and dollars, and what changed was the spelling of one of the account codes. They said that none of the calculations, logic or sorting/filtering changed. The manager asked us to go line by line to make sure the changed account code is correct everywhere. Nothing wrong with that.

However, now that I'm looking at it, I think going line by line is "working harder, not smarter". First off the account code that got changed is not on every line, so I can just search for it and skip a bunch of lines. The beginning part of the code is the same, and as I mentioned, the sort hasn't changed, so it's in all the same rows before and after.

Also, I used to be a software developer so I strongly suspect that the account codes are pulled out of a database table, which would mean if this changed one is wrong on one line, it's wrong on all the lines equally. Or if it's correct on one line, then it's correct on all lines equally. So I only really need to find it once in the "after" reports to see if it's correct. Or if I want to be super sure, I could sort on the account code column to put all instances of this account code together and quickly scan them.

All of which changes a multi-hour team effort into a five minute task for one person.

Now I'm not a QA person. I know they need to be methodical and detailed. Aside from going line by line just because we were asked to, where could my approach go wrong in this specific scenario? (and this is why I would suck at testing!)