I believe the majority of Excel spreadsheets are just lists.
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I used some of the statistical overviews: File Analysis - Modern CSV Documentation
And if you are looking for a cross-OS tool (Mac, Win, Linux) I guess it has its advantages to use one product.
Again, both products are good. My personal preference is Easy CSV Editor.
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Yes, you can edit, replace, copy fields. With both apps I mentioned.
This article came a month too late for me because I recently upgraded to V2 of
I use it for a single, table shuffling job, so it’s overkill for me. The good thing about it is the routine I’ve set up runs on open, on a preset file and exports without me having to do anything.
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With Delicious Library 3 all but dead, Modern CSV seems the way to go to preserve existing file data and work with it. Adding new items could be challenging but since I haven’t found a decent multiple media database manager to replace DL3, I can use Modern CSV with an exported CSV file from DL3.
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I’m not sure I understand the huge jump from Delicious Library 3 to Modern CSV!
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EasyDataTransform is an absolute powerhouse and there’s else nothing like it, but it’s doing a rather different job to these table editors; it can do everything they can do, but works at a higher level of abstraction and wouldn’t be my first choice for ad hoc editing of a single table. (It’s Easy CSV Editor for me: ridiculously cheap even with the excellent Import/Export IAP, frequently updated, works on older systems, and offers a good bundle deal with his JSON and PLIST editors.) But the same developer’s HyperPlan is my absolute favourite app for working with tabular data; it gives you a kanban-style visual front end to your .csv data which lets you view and manipulate it in dynamic diagrammatic views. Hard to describe, but very powerful and easy to use. There’s a 14-day trial version.
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DL3 exports to CSV. There’s no single app that can replace it. That means I’m stuck manually managing and tracking my 4400 items from DL3 using the CSV export. macOS Numbers isn’t really cutting it for me in this case. It seems like Modern CSV is more effective.
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I just used Modern CSV extremely effectively today to regularize three columns of times for 379 runners. Some were just seconds (0:02), some were minutes and seconds (12:31), and some were hours, minutes, and seconds (1:18:23).
To get them to sort properly, I needed to pad them all into the same hh:mm:ss format. It took a handful of grep searches and column transforms (prepending data) to get it all working, but I can’t even imagine doing that in a spreadsheet. (Well, OK, I can because I have an overactive imagination, but it would involve converting everything to seconds and then back into a readable format, which would be insanely fiddly.)
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Another app to put in your toolkit for dealing with very large tabular datasets is Open Refine. This is great especially for dealing with messy datasets, for example, a list of addresses where some rows include a second address-row field and some don’t, and you need to align them, or some rows have “Texas,” “Tx,” or “TX” and you want to standardize them. It’s also very fast.
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I love this article so much. I thought maybe I was the only one who would find the subject matter riveting but look at all the data nerds I found here! I don’t know why Adam says it’s hard to use Excel or Numbers with elapsed time …
I was so frustrated with this that I wrote a web app to add elapsed time.
Working with time in spreadsheets is one of those things that makes me question my sanity. Luckily, I mostly just want to deal with formatting and display.
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Table Tool (free on mac app store) is another app that lets you open and edit a CSV directly. It can handle and convert between CSV/TSV dialects, move columns around and it lets you edit data fields directly. Modern CSV and https://www.easydatatransform.com/ are more powerful, however, when it comes to all sorts of automated data transformations.
There’s a more recent, improved, and well-maintained fork of TableTool but it’s still a little quirky. https://github.com/alexanderjamesrohrig/TableTool
Lots of rebranded versions of the Table Tool source code on the Mac App Store (eg. RuneCSV) every indie developer has to put up with open source grifters.
A lot of these other CSV editors only allow you to manipulate by line/row, but often I need to do things by column or per cell. That’s where Modern CSV excels 
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Yowsah!
As mentioned above, OpenRefine is a beast of database cleaning. It’s not just for CSV’s, it handles 10+(?) formats. It’s been around for 15 years or so, is open source—supported by Google for some time— and is actively maintained. It is not for the sort of quick changes that Adam needs but if you are a serious data-cleaning-checking-transforming person it is very powerful. It’s a full Mac app that, in fact, loads its own java environment and uses your browser for an interface. It is elegant with extensive documentation.
Use it to clip off hundredths of a second from a boisterous time field every few weeks? 
Er, no.
Switch from an inline address to a stacked one for tens of thousands of them or the other way round?
Joe Shmoe▲1 street▲City▲State▲Zip
Joe Shmoe
1 Street
City
State
Zip
Yes, indeed.
Execute JPython transforms or filters on one column? Yawn, sure.
Way overkill for most people visiting here but I’d never heard of it and boy would it have been useful a few years ago. . . .
Dave
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Is there any way I can do NUMBER cruching when using a csv editor like Modern CSV?
No, at that point you should load it into spreadsheet app like Numbers, Sheets, Excel.
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Just from a learning point of view, I can do everything in Numbers, whats so special about a CSV editor like Modern CSV, that I cannot do in Numbers? Don’t misunderstand the quesion, but I was attracted to the concept of Modern CSV since it is a one time purchase and not a subsctipion, and that means it will be cheaper than Excel, but what is the whole idea if one cannot crunch numbers in it?
Basically for the types of editing that don’t involve number crunching.
CSV is a simple static format (just text) used for storage or interoperability.
Spreadsheet is a rich dynamic format (text, numbers, references, formula, etc) used for calculations and more.
They’re not replacements for each other, as they serve different and complimentary purposes. That’s why both have survived.
With that said, if you have to handle or work with CSV—wrangling or munging the data, but not recalculating values—the options are:
- do it in plain text (laborious),
- load/import it into a spreadsheet (overkill, long-winded, you have to deal with exporting the file after editing to keep it as CSV)
- use a dedicated app like ModernCSV that sits in-between 1 and 2.
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That was very useful indeed, and makes a ton of sense.
Thank you so much!
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