Quickly browse large CSV files on the desktop with Tad

When you first get a CSV file, sometimes it’s useful to poke at it a bit to see what’s there. Sometimes you need to restructure the data or sort it in some non-straightforward way. Tad is a lightweight desktop application that helps with this early stage of data gathering, “designed to fit in to the workflow of data engineers and data scientists.” It’s free and open source.

I played around with it a little bit, and it’s still a little rough around the edges, but it seems like a promising start, especially for larger datasets. For small datasets, you’re probably better off just firing up R, Excel, or whatever software you use already.