6 ms·

Show HN: Tool I created to covert tabular data to a 'pretty' table

107 points by dougbarrett 7y ago

dougbarrett 7y ago
Creator here. I'm always running queries in Sequel Pro and pasting screenshots, or pasting the data into an excel spreadsheet and uploading that to slack for co-workers, because Slack doesn't have the ability to render tables. Yesterday, my screenshots weren't working at all when sharing them in slack, and I couldn't find a tool out there that could take tabular data and convert it to an easy to navigate table w/ an option to download as a CSV file, so I made my own. Let me know if you have any questions or comments!
- martin_ 7y ago
  Any chance of adding a placeholder text for each of the options so folks can see what the output looks like without obtaining a result-set themselves :)
  - dougbarrett 7y ago
    Absolutely, the next build will have that.
  - dougbarrett 7y ago
    An example has been added to the homepage to see what the output looks like!
- tastroder 7y ago
  If you find the time and mobile viewing is in scope, the site would benefit from an example on the homepage for us mobile users that don't have a table handy.
  - bobbonew 7y ago
    Example, yes please!
    - dougbarrett 7y ago
      An example has been added!
  - dougbarrett 7y ago
    An example has been added!
- lucasverra 7y ago
  i do not understand the use case but im not too much in contact with big ugly excels nor SQL. Is this for copying some poor visually formatted excel and have a clear view of it in your solution ?
  - dougbarrett 7y ago
    I usually use Sequel Pro to run queries against a MySQL server, typically I'll take a quick screenshot and send it to co-workers, sometimes the screenshots fail, there is too much data in it to be useful, or they do need an excel spreadsheet which requires more steps than I would like. I built it as a quick tool so I can easily copy the output of the query, paste it in the textbox, and an HTML table is generated.
- Flashtoo 7y ago
  You might also be interested in JExcel: https://bossanova.uk/jexcel/v3/ https://bossanova.uk/jexcel/v3/ It can take tabular data, allows you to do some Excel-like editing on it and download as CSV. Might be a bit heavy for your purposes, but it is easy to use and extend.
- foreigner 7y ago
  Doesn't appear to be working for CSV? e.g.: https://dv.dbb1.dev/sheets/1a53b5aa-2b00-4f58-ad75-84a31dcde5e2 https://dv.dbb1.dev/sheets/1a53b5aa-2b00-4f58-ad75-84a31dcde...
  - dougbarrett 7y ago
    Thank you for testing it out, it doesn't have support yet, but it will soon!
- onion2k 7y ago
  SheetJS has an open source library xlsx-js[1] that can parse most Excel files. You could use that combined with FileReader (the browser file API) to enable users to drop a spreadsheet file on the page instead of copying and pasting. It'd be a nice addition. [1] https://github.com/SheetJS/js-xlsx https://github.com/SheetJS/js-xlsx
  - akx 7y ago
    +1. I'm using xlsx-js in the similar-ish tool I recently wrote: https://akx.github.io/d2d/ https://akx.github.io/d2d/
  - dougbarrett 7y ago
    Thank you for the suggestion, I will look into the library!
- AdieuToLogic 7y ago
  It appears your tool does not support pipe-delimited data in the "data to table" choice. An example is: a|1 b|2 c|3 This is a pretty common data format and one which people whom use your tool may appreciate. HTH
  - dougbarrett 7y ago
    Thank you for the feedback! Pipe and CSV are next on the list :)
- iSnow 7y ago
  Doesn't seem to work for the following CSV: date,x-numbers,y-numbers 2015-01-01,3,3 2016-01-01,2,3 2017-01-01,1,5 2018-01-01,3,8
  - dougbarrett 7y ago
    CSV support is coming within the next day!
- teekert 7y ago
  Is it Pandas based? I'm a bioinformatician and many of my data work flows start with pandas.read_excel() and end with pandas.DataFrame().to_excel(). I had some serious issues with it but I have come to terms with it. Actually Excel is ok as a central project "database" (up to certain size of course), anyone can quickly fill in a lot or rows (the smart dragging, the macro's that take in other Excel files, drop-downs for categories that I later use in Pandas/Seaborn...) and programmatically dealing with it is not too bad (pandas for bulk stuff, openpyxl for very fine-grained control and even conditional formatting, which we use a lot, etc).
  - dougbarrett 7y ago
    There isn't too much to the rendered document, it reads the text as TSV and breaks that out into rows and cells. I tried keeping it as simple as possible for now, the idea isn't to help analyze data, but be able to share data in a usable format easily.
seektable 7y ago
what is the difference with existing free BI tools with publish to web functionality?..
- dougbarrett 7y ago
  Unless you hit certain thresholds, this won’t require an account. It’s not designed to run analysis, only to simply share data.
drej 7y ago
Do you need to share small-sih tabular data and have some control over it? Use Github's gists. Unless your data is quite large, it will render CSVs just fine, allow for edits, comments, title, ... And it's in your account, so you can keep track.
- dougbarrett 7y ago
  I just tested it out and the gist works pretty well! It did confuse me for a minute that it didn’t render the table view on mobile, and there is no way to sort the columns as well.
smartera 7y ago
Nice tool. I was really hoping though it can help me tabulate messy copied text data from PDF. For example, from Philips 2018 annual report [0], I copy the income statement, and I get the below when I paste. I found it impossible to get this into Excel or any other table format, without writing a Python program for it. Your tool still made it as one column. If there's a way you can automatically detect the 3 numeric columns below, you can have a large audience of finance folk analyzing PDF documents. Sales. 17,422 17,780 18,121 Cost of sales (9,484) (9,600) (9,568) Gross margin 7,939 8,181 8,554 Selling expenses (4,142) (4,398) (4,500) General and administrative expenses (658) (577) (631) Research and development expenses (1,669) (1,764) (1,759) 6 Other business income. 17 152 88 6 Other business expenses. (23) (76) (33) 6 Income from operations. 1,464 1,517 1,719 7 Financial income. 65 126 51 7 Financial expenses. (507) (263) (264) Investments in associates, net of income taxes 11 (4) (2) Income before taxes 1,034 1,377 1,503 8 Income tax expense. (203) (349) (193) Income from continuing operations 831 1,028 1,310 3 Discontinued operations, net of income taxes. 660 843 (213) Net income 1,491 1,870 1,097 Attribution of net income Net income attributable to Koninklijke Philips N.V. shareholders 1,448 1,657 1,090 Net income attributable to non-controlling interests 43 214 7 [0] https://www.philips.com/c-dam/corporate/about-philips/sustainability/downloads/other/philips-full-annual-report-2018.pdf https://www.philips.com/c-dam/corporate/about-philips/sustai...
- martishrek666 7y ago
  You need someone like this dude on video to handle excel part...it is a skill in itself https://youtu.be/poyf3Cnb-MQ?t=2724 https://youtu.be/poyf3Cnb-MQ?t=2724
- udayrddy 7y ago
  Was this complicated to others or easy to us - attached the https://extracttable.com https://extracttable.com conversion for you. Input & output - https://imgur.com/a/5j8Bblo Table# 1 csv - https://json-csv.com/c/2faG Table# 2 csv - https://json-csv.com/c/WESI
- bonyt 7y ago
  Tabula is a helpful tool for extracting tables from PDFs, although its more for large tables of data, often spanning many pages, rather than the odd copy-and-paste. https://tabula.technology https://tabula.technology As for your specific example, you can download tables from EDGAR in other formats, like HTML and iXBRL. The HTML table will usually paste into Excel well. HTML: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/313216/000031321619000007/phg-20181231.htm#tx20644616-statements https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/313216/0000313216190... iXBRL: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/313216/000031321618000007/phg-20171231_htm.xml https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/313216/0000313216180... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBRL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBRL
somada141 7y ago
I always used https://www.tablesgenerator.com https://www.tablesgenerator.com to quickly render tabular data from SequelPro or Excel into LaTeX, Markdown, HTML etc. I’ve found it to be an absolute time-saver.
philshem 7y ago
It's a pretty tool, but like the other comment says, it could use a screenshot! It's also not clear how long the link is active, or that we are even supposed to share the link. Also, hosting (open) data anonymously is a market niche (since pastebin have a 500kb size) but you may not want to become the anonymous data host for obvious reasons.
- dougbarrett 7y ago
  I appreciate the feedback, my intention is absolutely to not become an anonymous data website, the next iteration will require an e-mail address to paste a link that lasts longer than 24 hours and you'll be e-mailed a sharing link and a link to delete the 'sheet'. Future versions will include an admin with a ton of other features and converstions.

107 points by dougbarrett 7y ago

Creator here. I'm always running queries in Sequel Pro and pasting screenshots, or pasting the data into an excel spreadsheet and uploading that to slack for co-workers, because Slack doesn't have the ability to render tables. Yesterday, my screenshots weren't working at all when sharing them in slack, and I couldn't find a tool out there that could take tabular data and convert it to an easy to navigate table w/ an option to download as a CSV file, so I made my own. Let me know if you have any questions or comments!

martin_ 7y ago
Any chance of adding a placeholder text for each of the options so folks can see what the output looks like without obtaining a result-set themselves :)
- dougbarrett 7y ago
  Absolutely, the next build will have that.
- dougbarrett 7y ago
  An example has been added to the homepage to see what the output looks like!
tastroder 7y ago
If you find the time and mobile viewing is in scope, the site would benefit from an example on the homepage for us mobile users that don't have a table handy.
- bobbonew 7y ago
  Example, yes please!
  - dougbarrett 7y ago
    An example has been added!
- dougbarrett 7y ago
  An example has been added!
lucasverra 7y ago
i do not understand the use case but im not too much in contact with big ugly excels nor SQL. Is this for copying some poor visually formatted excel and have a clear view of it in your solution ?
- dougbarrett 7y ago
  I usually use Sequel Pro to run queries against a MySQL server, typically I'll take a quick screenshot and send it to co-workers, sometimes the screenshots fail, there is too much data in it to be useful, or they do need an excel spreadsheet which requires more steps than I would like. I built it as a quick tool so I can easily copy the output of the query, paste it in the textbox, and an HTML table is generated.
Flashtoo 7y ago
You might also be interested in JExcel: https://bossanova.uk/jexcel/v3/ https://bossanova.uk/jexcel/v3/ It can take tabular data, allows you to do some Excel-like editing on it and download as CSV. Might be a bit heavy for your purposes, but it is easy to use and extend.
foreigner 7y ago
Doesn't appear to be working for CSV? e.g.: https://dv.dbb1.dev/sheets/1a53b5aa-2b00-4f58-ad75-84a31dcde5e2 https://dv.dbb1.dev/sheets/1a53b5aa-2b00-4f58-ad75-84a31dcde...
- dougbarrett 7y ago
  Thank you for testing it out, it doesn't have support yet, but it will soon!
onion2k 7y ago
SheetJS has an open source library xlsx-js[1] that can parse most Excel files. You could use that combined with FileReader (the browser file API) to enable users to drop a spreadsheet file on the page instead of copying and pasting. It'd be a nice addition. [1] https://github.com/SheetJS/js-xlsx https://github.com/SheetJS/js-xlsx
- akx 7y ago
  +1. I'm using xlsx-js in the similar-ish tool I recently wrote: https://akx.github.io/d2d/ https://akx.github.io/d2d/
- dougbarrett 7y ago
  Thank you for the suggestion, I will look into the library!
AdieuToLogic 7y ago
It appears your tool does not support pipe-delimited data in the "data to table" choice. An example is: a|1 b|2 c|3 This is a pretty common data format and one which people whom use your tool may appreciate. HTH
- dougbarrett 7y ago
  Thank you for the feedback! Pipe and CSV are next on the list :)
iSnow 7y ago
Doesn't seem to work for the following CSV: date,x-numbers,y-numbers 2015-01-01,3,3 2016-01-01,2,3 2017-01-01,1,5 2018-01-01,3,8
- dougbarrett 7y ago
  CSV support is coming within the next day!
teekert 7y ago
Is it Pandas based? I'm a bioinformatician and many of my data work flows start with pandas.read_excel() and end with pandas.DataFrame().to_excel(). I had some serious issues with it but I have come to terms with it. Actually Excel is ok as a central project "database" (up to certain size of course), anyone can quickly fill in a lot or rows (the smart dragging, the macro's that take in other Excel files, drop-downs for categories that I later use in Pandas/Seaborn...) and programmatically dealing with it is not too bad (pandas for bulk stuff, openpyxl for very fine-grained control and even conditional formatting, which we use a lot, etc).
- dougbarrett 7y ago
  There isn't too much to the rendered document, it reads the text as TSV and breaks that out into rows and cells. I tried keeping it as simple as possible for now, the idea isn't to help analyze data, but be able to share data in a usable format easily.

seektable 7y ago

what is the difference with existing free BI tools with publish to web functionality?..

dougbarrett 7y ago
Unless you hit certain thresholds, this won’t require an account. It’s not designed to run analysis, only to simply share data.

drej 7y ago

Do you need to share small-sih tabular data and have some control over it? Use Github's gists. Unless your data is quite large, it will render CSVs just fine, allow for edits, comments, title, ... And it's in your account, so you can keep track.

dougbarrett 7y ago
I just tested it out and the gist works pretty well! It did confuse me for a minute that it didn’t render the table view on mobile, and there is no way to sort the columns as well.

smartera 7y ago

Nice tool. I was really hoping though it can help me tabulate messy copied text data from PDF. For example, from Philips 2018 annual report [0], I copy the income statement, and I get the below when I paste. I found it impossible to get this into Excel or any other table format, without writing a Python program for it. Your tool still made it as one column. If there's a way you can automatically detect the 3 numeric columns below, you can have a large audience of finance folk analyzing PDF documents. Sales. 17,422 17,780 18,121 Cost of sales (9,484) (9,600) (9,568) Gross margin 7,939 8,181 8,554 Selling expenses (4,142) (4,398) (4,500) General and administrative expenses (658) (577) (631) Research and development expenses (1,669) (1,764) (1,759) 6 Other business income. 17 152 88 6 Other business expenses. (23) (76) (33) 6 Income from operations. 1,464 1,517 1,719 7 Financial income. 65 126 51 7 Financial expenses. (507) (263) (264) Investments in associates, net of income taxes 11 (4) (2) Income before taxes 1,034 1,377 1,503 8 Income tax expense. (203) (349) (193) Income from continuing operations 831 1,028 1,310 3 Discontinued operations, net of income taxes. 660 843 (213) Net income 1,491 1,870 1,097 Attribution of net income Net income attributable to Koninklijke Philips N.V. shareholders 1,448 1,657 1,090 Net income attributable to non-controlling interests 43 214 7 [0] https://www.philips.com/c-dam/corporate/about-philips/sustainability/downloads/other/philips-full-annual-report-2018.pdf https://www.philips.com/c-dam/corporate/about-philips/sustai...

martishrek666 7y ago
You need someone like this dude on video to handle excel part...it is a skill in itself https://youtu.be/poyf3Cnb-MQ?t=2724 https://youtu.be/poyf3Cnb-MQ?t=2724
udayrddy 7y ago
Was this complicated to others or easy to us - attached the https://extracttable.com https://extracttable.com conversion for you. Input & output - https://imgur.com/a/5j8Bblo Table# 1 csv - https://json-csv.com/c/2faG Table# 2 csv - https://json-csv.com/c/WESI
bonyt 7y ago
Tabula is a helpful tool for extracting tables from PDFs, although its more for large tables of data, often spanning many pages, rather than the odd copy-and-paste. https://tabula.technology https://tabula.technology As for your specific example, you can download tables from EDGAR in other formats, like HTML and iXBRL. The HTML table will usually paste into Excel well. HTML: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/313216/000031321619000007/phg-20181231.htm#tx20644616-statements https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/313216/0000313216190... iXBRL: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/313216/000031321618000007/phg-20171231_htm.xml https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/313216/0000313216180... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBRL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBRL

somada141 7y ago

I always used https://www.tablesgenerator.com https://www.tablesgenerator.com to quickly render tabular data from SequelPro or Excel into LaTeX, Markdown, HTML etc. I’ve found it to be an absolute time-saver.

philshem 7y ago

It's a pretty tool, but like the other comment says, it could use a screenshot! It's also not clear how long the link is active, or that we are even supposed to share the link. Also, hosting (open) data anonymously is a market niche (since pastebin have a 500kb size) but you may not want to become the anonymous data host for obvious reasons.

dougbarrett 7y ago
I appreciate the feedback, my intention is absolutely to not become an anonymous data website, the next iteration will require an e-mail address to paste a link that lasts longer than 24 hours and you'll be e-mailed a sharing link and a link to delete the 'sheet'. Future versions will include an admin with a ton of other features and converstions.