Modern CSV Lets You Manipulate CSV Files Directly

[jonathan2 (Jonathan Duke)]

@gingerbeardman

1. do it in plain text (laborious),
2. load/import it into a spreadsheet (overkill, long-winded, you have to deal with exporting the file after editing to keep it as CSV)
3. use a dedicated app like ModernCSV that sits in-between 1 and 2.

@gingerbeardman Please add 2a-Hope that the spreadsheet doesn’t mangle the data in some way.

[colleenthompson]

This app would’ve been very useful to me in years past, when I did a lot of database work. Like at least one other commenter, FileMaker Pro was my go-to for massaging CSV files. Another useful app for less-weighty tasks was Tex Edit Plus which has been discontinued, but was far superior to Text Edit for basic text manipulation.

[josehill]

@gingerbeardman

They’re not replacements for each other, as they serve different and complimentary purposes. That’s why both have survived.

Agreed. For a lot of people, it’s about having a range of tools in the toolbox and knowing how to use them.

I just had a practical example of this a few days ago: I had a large CSV file that needed several non-adjacent columns converted to one case or another, e.g., all caps, sentence case, etc. I could think of any number of ways to accomplish this task. Even though Excel could do it with Functions and Numbers could do it directly with menu commands, it was easy and lightning fast to do it with Easy CSV Editor.

If I were someone who lived in Numbers or Excel and always had one of them open, I might have used one of them, but with only slight exaggeration, I think I opened Easy CSV Editor and started processing columns in the time it would have taken either Excel or Numbers simply to launch.