#READ.CSV IN TABULAR LAYOUT TRIAL#
There was a trial available, so I gave it a try, especially since they have a FREE version. In frustration, I searched (again!) for a better solution for working with files of “comma separated values” and I stumbled on Modern CSV. Kind of like using a handgun to kill a mosquito.Įarlier this year, I was drafted into yet another project where I had to edit and organize a large amount of textual data, and those “big programs” kept corrupting the data by adding their own information. They’re all large, “Swiss Army Knife” solutions. Over the years, I’ve often had to deal with tables of data, I’ve used many different programs to deal with them, including Microsoft “Excel”, Open Office “Calc” and even Libre Office “Calc” they all work – sort of, anyway. ModernCSV does just that for CSV editing, and I can’t think of higher praise than that. Tools are supposed to act as an extension of ourselves to make a certain task easier. ModernCSV does its job well so that, rather than wrestling with tools that treat CSV manipulation as an afterthought, I can instead wrestle with the important parts of my project. ModernCSV took away a huge pain-point for me on this project. The interface for editing multiple cells, cutting/pasting, and filtering felt intuitive and, well, modern.
Within seconds I felt at home, able to easily navigate around and edit individual cells.
With a great deal of skepticism, I downloaded the “free trial” and fired up the editor. This time, though, SEO worked its magic and ModernCSV came up on the first page. I was loathing the idea of starting a project with this ETL system, and I googled “CSV editor” as I had a thousand times before expecting only disappointment. I found a terminal-based editor, but its keybindings were beyond my comprehension and I frequently destroyed my CSV files. Plaintext editors are a nuisance and I end up playing “count the commas”. Excel and other spreadsheet programs just mangle CSV format. I can chew through 100s of GB of data without batting an eye.īut hand-editing individual rows in CSV files has _always_ been a headache. I can slap together pipelines using xsv, perl, sed, csvkit, awk, grep, and countless other CLI utilities in my sleep. The CSV files varied in size from a 10s to 100s of rows, each one needing to be lovingly entered by hand. I inherited an ETL system that used a set of CSV files to “program” the ETL process.
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