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Show HN: CSV Explorer (YC F1) - Explore CSVs with Millions of Rows

csvexplorer.com

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Re: Show HN: CSV Explorer (YC F1) - Explore CSVs with Millions of Rows

#2

Post by jastr »

Hi HN!

A few months ago, a college friend reached out because his consulting company had just received a 60 Gb spreadsheet, and they didn't know what to do with it! They actually tried opening it in Excel.

I'm excited to Show HN CSV Explorer - a simple web tool for opening really big CSVs! Try it out, and let me know how it goes!

Re: Show HN: CSV Explorer (YC F1) - Explore CSVs with Millions of Rows

#5

Post by patwalls »

This is really awesome. What sparked this idea?

Not sure if you have this feature, but I think it would be really cool if you could open APIs to your own datasets. This could be really useful for enterprise applications that do a lot of flat file imports/exports to push/pull data.

Re: Show HN: CSV Explorer (YC F1) - Explore CSVs with Millions of Rows

#6

Post by xaybey »

I usually use csvkit (https://csvkit.readthedocs.io/en/1.0.1/index.html). There are commands to list the columns, filter, browse the data in a somewhat formatted way with less. Typing the commands is a huge pain though, and I would be very interested in a tool that could instantly pop open and let me peruse. Excel can take minutes to load and eagerly does a lot of unhelpful formatting on things like dates and decimals.

That being said I would never want to (and often legally cannot) etl my data to some third party. That would be terribly slow. But I would happily pay for a nice desktop tool to do it for me; command line or GUI.

Re: Show HN: CSV Explorer (YC F1) - Explore CSVs with Millions of Rows

#8

Post by goatlover »

jastr wrote: post #2

Hi HN! A few months ago, a college friend reached out because his consulting company had just received a 60 Gb spreadsheet, and they didn't know what to do with it! They actually tried opening it in Excel. I'm excited to Show HN CSV Explorer - a simple web tool for opening really big CSVs! Try it out, and let me know how it goes!

Open it with a programming language like R, Julia or Python that supports the data frames. No reason to upload 60 gigs to the web or Excel.

Re: Show HN: CSV Explorer (YC F1) - Explore CSVs with Millions of Rows

#9

Post by jastr »

xaybey wrote: post #6

I usually use csvkit ( https://csvkit.readthedocs.io/en/1.0.1/index.html ). There are commands to list the columns, filter, browse the data in a somewhat formatted way with less. Typing the commands is a huge pain though, and I would be very interested in a tool that could instantly pop open and let me peruse. Excel can take minutes to load and eagerly does a lot of unhelpful formatting on things like dates and decim…

Csvkit is great, and I use it a lot. The target users for CSV Explorer though are mostly non-engineers ie. people who don't use the command line or code.
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