Periodically I find myself needing to play with some data in a lot of different ways and potentially share that data in a professional context where appearance

Periodically I find myself needing to play with some data in a lot of different ways and potentially share that data in a professional context where appearance matters. It is during those periods I start looking up all of the excel functions and features. However, if I am only occasionally looking at data and/or repeating the same operations than code + csv (or database) makes a lot more sense and gives me flexibility to deal with edge cases. I still end up opening it in excel but mostly because I already have it installed. To be honest, I would sort of like a more primitive fast csv data viewer for times when I am feeling rusty on excel and bullish on small scripts. When you are doing the data manipulation elsewhere excel is overkill. But every now and then it is a lifesaver