Fathom Information Design, known for client visualization-centric projects, introduced Rowboat. It’s a tool that lets you load large CSV files or Excel spreadsheets quickly in the browser. See summary graphics for each column, filter based on criteria, and quickly explore the dataset.
It’s surprisingly fast for running in the browser. I threw a couple hundred megabytes at it and the view loaded in a few seconds. So I threw in half a gigabyte and it still did fine. The tool did not like a file over a gigabyte. It seemed to really not like files with a lot of columns even though they were relatively small.
So Rowboat is currently focused on a specific set of tasks with a certain type of data, and it works well at that. Most of the tool is free for now, but there a paid tier that lets save data and export reports.
