CSView

Customizable summary review of CSV content.

About

CSView is a tool to provide a way to view and understand CSV content. Select what columns are displayed, and how their values are understood. Filter the rows by your criteria. Display the results as a table that can be sorted by any column, or view as a chart and zoom in on the area of interest. Save the results as a local file.

Actions

Available actions and their options are accessed through the set of buttons along the top of the page. Clicking on the button will open (or close) a dialog box with the options and other parameters.

Imports

Begin with this "Imports" operation to load some CSV content. For the easy cases, the CSV content can be copied from any source and pasted into the designated text box. CSV content can be loaded from the local filesystem (either by using the file chooser to browse and select a file, or by a drag-and-drop gesture). This app can also load CSV content from a remote website; however, scripted access to remote content is potentially a security risk (see CORS), so for many webservers you will need to fetch the data directly and save a copy on your local system which can then be easily loaded into this app.

Columns

The "Columns" operation allows selections from the full set of columns found in the data. Also, some simple modifications of the data can be performed (set the column to be parsed as numeric or as strings or convert the strings into a date or time value).

Filters

The "Filters" can be used to trim unwanted rows from the current dataset. A filter can be disabled by unsetting or clearing one or more parts of the filter definition, which will restore the full dataset. Also when starting no rows are filtered, so loading a new dataset or reloading a current dataset will clear all filters.

Views

"Views" controls the display of the CSV content, either as a table or as a chart.

The "Table" is the default display. Clicking on a column header sorts the table by that column's values. With the view options for tables there is a button to shrink the table display by using a small font size, which can be helpful when looking at datasets with many columns selected. Formatting large tables is very compute intensive for most browsers, so to avoid responsiveness issues the table views are truncated after a set number of rows (though this limit can be adjusted to suit, or can be set to an enormous value if a complete table with hundreds or thousands of rows is desired).

The "Chart" display provides a means of doing simple visualizations of the dataset. Select a column to use for the X-axis (horizontal), and another column to use for the Y-axis (vertical), and a scatterplot is displayed. A third column can be selected to use for coloring the points on the chart. Any numeric or date field can be charted (text fields work only as labels, not as axis values). Hovering over any point in the chart will generate a pop-up display of that point's label value and also change the color of all points that share the same value for the grouping column. Dragging the crosshair cursor will select an area of the chart to zoom into; an empty selection (a double click) will return to the original whole chart view.

Exports

Finally, the "Exports" operations allow the original or the current data to be saved out to a local file.

Note: The button at the end of the row of action buttons can be used to hide the configuration controls (which may be useful for screenshots).

Background information at Fisodd.com/code/csview.