What is a good light-weight CSV viewer? [closed]

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Closed 3 years ago.

Are there any good lightweight CSV viewers out there? I would like something that easily refreshes a file after it has been modified. A quick google search didn't turn up any clear winners.

I'd prefer not to have to open Excel each time since it locks the file. This prevents any other programs from updating the file.

Answer 1

You could try Ron's Editor - it will do what you want, is MUCH better than Excel for editing CSV files IMHO (that's why I wrote it), and I will let you decide if its light enough ;-)

Answer 2

Beacuse I was unhappy with how Excel displays CSV files, I produced a small executable designed to display CSV files. I recently made it available at http://csvquickviewer.com/ It’s only available for Windows because its writing in .NET

It does not need configuration but allows filtering, searching etc.

Answer 3

OKFN's DataPipes SaaS Tool is an option for using in-browser.
GitHub automagically renders CSV into tables, providing another in-browser option, along with more functionality.

Answer 4

This is for viewing only, using Powershell...

GUI Display; supports sorting, filtering:

    Import-Csv yourfile.csv |Out-GridView

Console Display:

    Import-Csv yourfile.csv |Format-Table -AutoSize

or:

    Import-Csv yourfile.csv |Format-List

For additional sorting and filtering options, pipe through where-object and sort-object cmdlets

Answer 5

If your system has Cygwin, column -t in a terminal window is what I like to use.

$ cat file.csv
1,2,3,4
A,B,C,D
i,ii,iii,iv,v
foo,bar,foo foo,foobar
No commas

$ column -t -s"," file.csv
1          2    3        4
A          B    C        D
i          ii   iii      iv      v
foo        bar  foo foo  foobar
No commas

In order to update with changes to the original as you requested, you can combine it with the watch command:

watch column -t -s, file.csv

Answer 6

I use Nirsoft's CSVFileView. It is a simple lightweight read-only csv viewer.

Note: due to password recovery tools on Nirsoft's site many virus checkers will block executables downloaded from there.