This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by David Kershaw
Have you ever wanted a GUI to wrangle and explore CSV files? Does your data need to be essentially perfect? Do you need to automate regular CSV processing and loading for efficiency and agility?
This post answers the call with three awesome open source apps that approach these problems — and more — from different directions. Options are good! Especially since the number of CSV-based workflow use cases is, well, it’s innumerable.
The three tools we’re going to look at are:
- Open Data Editor by the Open Knowledge Foundation
- QSV Pro by DatHere
- FlightPath Data by Atesta Analytics
All three are available today. I’m going to just give my first impression notes here. A more in-depth intro and breakdown is coming soon. The apps are young and evolving quickly so you can expect new features and capabilities before then.
Open Data Editor
Type of App: Cross-platform Windows/MacOS/Linux application
Where TO Get It: Download from https://okfn.org/en/projects/open-data-editor/
Application Focus: Understand your data, edit your data to fix problems, collect metadata
Builds On: The Frictionless Framework framework
Key Features: Review and edit CSV, Create metadata specifications, Column sorting, Errors report, Export to CKAN, AI API integration
Strengths and Use Cases: Validation of CSV columns and tables, data exploration, including some non-CSV data
Target Audience: Non-coders / Journalists and researchers / Open data maintainers
QSV Pro
Type of App: Cross-platform Windows / MacOS / Linux application
Where To Get It: Download from https://qsvpro.dathere.com/
Application Focus: Analyze and transform CSV, automation, metadata, wrangle huge files
Builds On: The QSV commandline CSV processing tool
Key Features: Review and edit huge CSV, pre-built automation recipes for QSV, wide range of transformation options with detailed documentation, export to CKAN and other data portals, run SQL queries on CSV using Polars
Strengths: qsv pro is a complete data hacking environment focused on speed and flexibility. In context documentation and pre-built recipes make a complex commandline tool more accessible and visual.
Target Audience: Technical people, not necessarily coders / data engineers / data set maintainers
FlightPath Data
Type of App: Cross-platform Windows / MacOS / Linux application
Where To Get It: Windows from the Microsoft Store / MacOS from the MacOS App Store / GitHub for any platform
Application Focus: Data preboarding automation (including durable identification, validation & upgrading, lineage metadata, publishing)
Builds On: CsvPath Framework
Key Features: Rules and schemas-based validation, multi-cloud integration, immutable versioned storage, idempotent processing, integration with observability platforms
Strengths and Use Cases: Easy project-based data preboarding automation for enterprise DataOps teams, strong CSV/Excel validation
Target Audience: Data engineers
There you have it in a nutshell: three great open source tools to help you wrangle and manage your CSV and other tabular data files — no matter what your scenario is. Check them out!
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by David Kershaw