What is a good light-weight CSV viewer?

Windows Problem Overview

Are there any good lightweight CSV viewers out there? I would like something that easily refreshes a file after it has been modified. A quick google search didn't turn up any clear winners.

I'd prefer not to have to open Excel each time since it locks the file. This prevents any other programs from updating the file.

Windows Solutions

Solution 1 - Windows

This is for viewing only, using Powershell...

GUI Display; supports sorting, filtering:

    Import-Csv yourfile.csv |Out-GridView

Console Display:

    Import-Csv yourfile.csv |Format-Table -AutoSize

or:

    Import-Csv yourfile.csv |Format-List

For additional sorting and filtering options, pipe through where-object and sort-object cmdlets

Solution 2 - Windows

I use Nirsoft's CSVFileView. It is a simple lightweight read-only csv viewer.

Note: due to password recovery tools on Nirsoft's site many virus checkers will block executables downloaded from there.

Solution 3 - Windows

If your system has Cygwin, column -t in a terminal window is what I like to use.

$ cat file.csv
1,2,3,4
A,B,C,D
i,ii,iii,iv,v
foo,bar,foo foo,foobar
No commas

$ column -t -s"," file.csv
1          2    3        4
A          B    C        D
i          ii   iii      iv      v
foo        bar  foo foo  foobar
No commas

In order to update with changes to the original as you requested, you can combine it with the watch command:

watch column -t -s, file.csv

Solution 4 - Windows

These threads both point to CSVed:

I tried it and had some issues with larger files (4000000 rows) with lots of columns (313), so YMMV.

I usually just use the BSD column utility. It's part of the util-linux package on windows:

Solution 5 - Windows

You could try Ron's Editor - it will do what you want, is MUCH better than Excel for editing CSV files IMHO (that's why I wrote it), and I will let you decide if its light enough ;-)

Solution 6 - Windows

Beacuse I was unhappy with how Excel displays CSV files, I produced a small executable designed to display CSV files. I recently made it available at http://csvquickviewer.com/ It’s only available for Windows because its writing in .NET

It does not need configuration but allows filtering, searching etc.

Solution 7 - Windows

Finally find one can instantly open large files, and automatically detect the delimiter: The V File Viewer from http://www.fileviewer.com/ 20 days free trial. $20 to buy.

Another one, which is extremely fast and also automatically detect the delimiter is Delimit from http://delimitware.com 15 days free trail. $49 / year. Kind of expensive.

Solution 8 - Windows

I believe there are Free excel viewers out there on Microsoft's site. And I think the native wordpad/write can also open up CSV files.

Solution 9 - Windows

If you just want to look at the file, why not use a text editor? The better ones will notice a refresh and prompt you if you want to reload the file. However, they won't separate the values out into different columns for you; they will only display the contents. Both UltraEdit and TextPad have been reliable for me in the past.

Solution 10 - Windows

OKFN's DataPipes SaaS Tool is an option for using in-browser.
GitHub automagically renders CSV into tables, providing another in-browser option, along with more functionality.

Content Type	Original Author	Original Content on Stackoverflow
Question	syvex	View Question on Stackoverflow
Solution 1 - Windows	Kevin	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 2 - Windows	robochat	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 3 - Windows	Costa	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 4 - Windows	Chris Betti	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 5 - Windows	Aaron Stewart	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 6 - Windows	Raphael Nöldner	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 7 - Windows	Feng Jiang	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 8 - Windows	Sivaram	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 9 - Windows	Ryan	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 10 - Windows	albert	View Answer on Stackoverflow