Sharepoint is fine if you are only tacking things at the file level. You can't answer stuff like "who changed the formula in E5?" Or even "how long has the formula in E5 been wrong?"
Some kind of auditability of Excel spreadsheets would save enormous amouns of money and time.
That's correct, textually `diff'ing two versions of a file in a bisecting fashion is quite disparate from viewing a document's change history. The idea of auditing and version control ought to be more intrinsic to a spreadsheet or database system than an after-thought supported (poorly) by external tools.
No. I'm not really looking for blame-generation, although others would. I don't do auditing, but some larger financial institutions do.
When investigating bugs (and more than a few times, we're turning into real code something cobbled out of an Excel spreadsheet, so the reference standard is the old spreadsheet), it helps to know why something is different from another, and why the formula in E5 is different than the formula in E4 or E6. It is incredibly easy to screw up formulas with inserting/removing rows with cut & paste.
Some kind of auditability of Excel spreadsheets would save enormous amouns of money and time.