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

windows

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.

Solution 1:

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

Solution 2:

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.

Solution 3:

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

Solution 4:

These threads both point to CSVed:

Light text editor for CSV file?
Looking for a very fast to load lightweight csv viewer

I tried it and had some issues with larger files (4000000 rows) with lots of columns (313), so YMMV.

I usually just use the BSD column utility. It's part of the util-linux package on windows:

Solution 5:

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 ;-)