The Tabular Data Viewer is intended simply to display comma separated or tabular
text data in a usable way. Data can be sorted, filtered, searched and exported.
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Screen Shot
Overview
Throughout my illustrious career I have often been involved with manipulating data
from textual sources, comma separated (csv files) or variations on that theme. Excel
was often employed for this job but contains many inflexibilities, or clumsy interfaces
when dealing with such data. Most notable among these is Excels row limit.
After much frustration I decided I could use a tool to simply display comma separated
data and let me play with it in order to do my job, and the product was born. It
went through many iterations and experimentations, and almost all of it has now
been re-written at least once, so I did not start this project with a clear design
in mind, it has evolved to my needs at the time.
At some point in the life cycle the underlying data source for the Report Viewer
was seperated from the GUI front end and re-designed and implemented as an interface
to an grid of data. As such almost any data source can be theoretically used with
it, currently the product supports the database sources supported by the .net framework
and textual data. However, I have not had time to write a graphical query builder
for the product, so I have decided to "play down" this functionality.
(For data sources that are not just textual data, source files need to be edited
using a text editor. A complete file format outline is to follow shortly).
Features
- Opens data from any format of text file (or .net data source).
- Re-name fields in the table.
- Change the type of the fields in the table allowing correct sorting and filtering.
This is particularly useful for text source data, for example changing a column
to a date.
- Parsing errors are highlighted in the table.
- Rows can be set to auto-height to display multi-line rows.
- Quick filter access from a context menu on the table.
- One key press easy search to search the whole table.
- Row per page view.
- Export to text, HTML, and Excel directly.
- Print support.
Technical Points
The whole product was written on an abstract interface to a grid of data, making
the data source completly 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 Viewer 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.
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge the excellent tools in the Development Tools section
on my Links page.