What is a good lightweight CSV viewer?

Question

Are there any good CSV viewers with good weight? I would like something that easily updates the file after changing it. A quick Google search revealed no clear winners.

I would prefer not to open Excel every time, since it locks the file. This prevents updates to any other programs.

Answer 1

It is view 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, through the where-object and sort-object cmdlets

Answer 2

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

 $ 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 ABCD i ii iii iv v foo bar foo foo foobar No commas 

To update with a change of the original at your request, you can combine it with the watch :

 watch column -t -s, file.csv 

Answer 3

I am using Nirsoft CSVFileView . This is a simple, easy to read csv viewer.

Note: thanks to password recovery tools on the Nirsoft website, many virus checkers will block executable files downloaded from there.

Answer 4

These threads indicate CSVed:

• https://superuser.com/questions/119655/light-text-editor-for-csv-file-on-windows
• https://superuser.com/questions/173217/looking-for-a-very-fast-to-load-lightweight-csv-viewer

I tried this and had some problems with large files (4,000,000 rows) with lots of columns (313), so YMMV.

Usually I just use the BSD column utility. This is part of the util-linux package on the windows:

• https://github.com/karelzak/util-linux

Answer 5

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

Answer 6

Beacuse I was unsatisfied with the way Excel displays CSV files, I created a small executable file designed to display CSV files. I recently made it available at http://csvquickviewer.com/. It is available only for Windows, since its entry in .NET

It does not need to be configured, but allows you to filter, search, etc.

Answer 7

I believe that Microsoft has free previews for readers. And I think the native wordpad / write can also open CSV files.

Answer 8

If you just want to look at the file, why not use a text editor? The best of them will notice the update and tell you if you want to reload the file. However, they will not split the values ​​into different columns for you; they will only display content. Both UltraEdit and TextPad have been reliable in the past for me.

Answer 9

OKFN DataPipes SaaS Tool is an option for use in a browser.
GitHub automatically converts CSV to tables, providing another option in the browser, as well as more functionality.

Answer 10

Finally, you can immediately open large files and automatically identify the delimiter: V File Viewer from http://www.fileviewer.com/ 20-day free trial, $ 20 to buy.

Another that is very fast and also automatically detects the delimiter is the Separate 15-day free trail from http://delimitware.com . $ 49 a year. The view is expensive.