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. 'Superbly designed and highly functional.' 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. These are only a few highlights of an impressive array of features. Sorting generally is great and does everything intuitively correctly. When selecting the header row, 'Sort Selected Row - Ascending' sorts all data according to ascending field names. applying 'Filter Selected Row' on the header row filters the columns only with the field name pattern searched for. Other extraordinary tools offer unexpected abilities: E.g. This can even be adjusted with a custom shortcut to a one keystroke action! There are many useful other actions like 'Remove Empty Columns' or 'Remove All Filtered Out and Hidden Data'. Let me tell you some highlights: I like how a Selected Column can be filtered with the selected cell content. This is precisely where Modern CSV has carved its niche: dealing with vast amounts of CSV data, transform them fast, and extract them to another data set.Īn indispensable tool, highly recommended. Excel and LibreOffice Calc are capable to read and save CSV data, but they reach their limits very fast - mostly when dealing with big amounts of data.

The ubiquitous open data exchange format is CSV. I have been using Modern CSV for more than a year now and, as a data scientist in Digital Humanities, I could not live without it. If you’re a programmer (who uses keyboard more often), you will be happy to find out there is a quick access to the command list you can type in and the ability to customize every shortcut, which makes editing so blissful. Having tried almost every CSV editor I could find, Modern CSV by far gives the most consistent and wonderful experience. What Our Users Say 'The most consistent and wonderful experience.'

Example csv file for adwords editor