Tabular Text Editor

The Tabular Text Editor is intended simply to display and edit comma separated or tabular text data in a usable way. Data can be edited, sorted, filtered, searched and exported.

The Tabular Text Editor has been (gradually) designed to load, edit and save any format of tabular text files (like CSV) in a fast clean and efficient manner. Not only can tabular text files be edited, but they easily filtered and summarized in as many extra views as required, adding powerful analysis functionality.

Features

	Opens data from any format of text file (delimiters can be configured).
	Edit panel easily acivated for multi-line cells or multi-cell updates.
	Organise the columns in your table - add/remove, change the name, change the type.
	Changing the type of the fields in the table allowing correct sorting and filtering. For example changing a column to a date.
	Editing functions include search/replace, split column, merge columns and undo/redo.
	Quickly and easily filter, sort and summarize the data - quick filter access from a context menu on the table.
	Rows can be set to auto-height to display multi-line rows.
	One key press easy search to search the whole table.
	Row per page view.
	Export to text, HTML, and Excel directly.
	Print support.

Comments

The whole product was written on an abstract interface to a grid of data, making the data source completely separate from the GUI implementation. This will allow me to plug in as many sources as I wish should the need arise in the future.

Getting data into Excel in an acceptable format has always been time consuming, so I spent time automating as much formatting as possible. I also made the link to Excel use late binding enabling the Data Editor to hopefully work with future versions of Excel. This has proved to pay off; with no alteration it currently works with all versions of Excel from 2000, up to and including Excel 2007.

History

This product started its life a long time ago, as little more than an extended data table viewer, which gradually grew to load tabular text files and accumulate summary and filtering functions. At some point it left the comfort of the work environment, and entered the product phase, where it was required to be a complete product that did not need constant nurturing. It was for this reason that one of the original features, SQL query sources, was dropped due to the lack of usable GUI. (The feature may yet return if there is demand).

It was actually requested by a downloader that I convert, what was originally a viewer, into an editor, and a few short weeks later: here it is.

Along the course of its life, the decision to separate the data storage from the GUI paid back ten fold, when the storage engine was upgraded from using DataTables to a purpose build architecture. All the GUI and high level functionality remained intact (ish) whilst the storage engine was swapped out under the hood. By now almost all the code has now been re-written at least once, as it evolved to my needs at the time.

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the excellent tools in the Development Tools section on my Links page.