You get your CSV file, snuggle under your blanket with a glass of fine wine, all ready for the perfect Saturday night. Then — what the heck — there’s a bunch of missing data and poorly formatted entries. Don’t let this happen to you. CSV Fingerprint by Victor Powell provides a simple, wideout view of your CSV file, color-coded for quick quality control.
To make it easier to spot mistakes, I’ve made a “CSV Fingerprint” viewer (named after the “Fashion Fingerprints” from The New York Times’s “Front Row to Fashion Week” interactive ). The idea is to provide a birdseye view of the file without too much distracting detail. The idea is similar to Tufte’s Image Quilts…a qualitative view, as opposed to a rendering of the data in the file themselves. In this sense, the CSV Fingerprint is a sort of meta visualization.
Try it with your own CSV data. Never let a subpar CSV file ruin your Saturday night again.
