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Comment by nojito | Hacker News Reader

>Vastly more useful to me (as an engineer) than Excel,

Open Excel --> Click Data --> Get Data --> From File (Csv) -> If it's clean already just do load to (add to data model) --> alt+n+v to insert pivot and impress your business folks.

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Thanks for the tip! The main issue in this particular case was that I never work with Excel, so I was shipped Excel files via Google Sheets (since I have no Excel license on my Mac). I was mostly trying to get into some environment that I was comfortable with so I could work confidently while others were waiting. Datasette was the best tool I could think of that would allow me full SQL access while also presenting a web page others could grok easily. The terminal is home for me, but I think it's off-putting to some, and Datasette bridges that nicely.

If the terminal is your home, I would suggest looking at something already mentioned by someone else VisiData (http://visidata.org), it is great for exploring all sorts of data files like CSV, Excel, Sqlite3, etc in the terminal.

I find the Datasette author's related tools sqlite-utils (https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-utils) and the Dogsheep tools (https://github.com/dogsheep) and VisiData are nicely complementary.

I prefer the interface of VisiData, but I don't usually need to share links.

This is fantastic! Thanks so much for the pointer...the ability to traverse tons of data formats quickly to "get a feel" for them (much like simonw's use case for some of the sqlite-utils) is exactly the tooling I need in cases like this, and the TUI interface is an awesome bonus. Will definitely be playing around with this over the next few days...thanks!

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