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

Answer 1

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 2

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 3

If you just want to look at the file, why not use a text editor? The better ones will notice a refresh and prompt you if you want to reload the file. However, they won't separate the values out into different columns for you; they will only display the contents. Both UltraEdit and TextPad have been reliable for me in the past.

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

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.

Answer 6

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 ;-)