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secretGeek / AwesomeCSV

🕶️A curated list of awesome tools for dealing with CSV.
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Tools for CSV data entry. #4

Closed yeedle closed 4 years ago

yeedle commented 5 years ago

Not sure if this is out of scope, but what about tools that can be used to create (and edit) CSVs manually?

Libre/Open Office Calc, Google Sheets, Excel, etc.

secretGeek commented 5 years ago

TL;DR: I don't want to catalog all tools that can be used for editing CSV. But if you have tools that are specifically awesome for editing CSV, I think it would be a worthy inclusion

Longer description:

I thought about this a lot (and i think you saw my tweets). I think recording tools for CSV data entry is a good idea, but to meet the rules of the "awesome" initiative, they have to be awesome tools.

I use Excel a great deal and it gets the job done tremendously when used as a spreadsheet. (Farrr superior to Google Sheets which I used a lot too).

But for CSV, Excel is not awesome, because it changes your values, and you can't stop it from doing this.

See for example https://support.office.com/en-us/article/stop-automatically-changing-numbers-to-dates-452bd2db-cc96-47d1-81e4-72cec11c4ed8 -- there is no way to stop it from changing numbers to dates (in a CSV file) without first changing the data in some other way. So this is not a reasonable approach for data integrity and data scientists need to demand better tools.

I'm not going to close this yet, as I'm interested in any further comments. Cheers! Your engagement is important to us. Beeeeeep.

yeedle commented 5 years ago

Thanks for your extremely thoughtful and reasonable response! I opened the issue because I have struggled with this in the past myself. Personally, I don't like to use spreadsheet software as CSV editors because they don't respect the format, and programmatic editing is not always feasible.

The only CSV Editor which I know of and believe fits the awesome category is Data Curator and its predecessor, Comma Chameleon. It's not perfect, but it's a thoughtful approach to data and the CSV format. So take a look and if you think it meets the awesome criteria, consider adding it. If I'll think of another tool I'll drop another comment.

secretGeek commented 5 years ago

I've seen Data Curator before (under the name Comma Chameleon) and note it's from my home state of Queensland. I tried using it today but it failed on the file I was working on. I'll test it again soon and try to find what's going on. So I'll leave this issue open until I've reached a conclusion either way with Data Curator.

Thank you Abraham, have a great day. lb

secretGeek commented 4 years ago

closing this issue now. good discussion tho. have a good day.