Show HN: Tool I created to covert tabular data to a 'pretty' table(dv.dbb1.dev)
dv.dbb1.dev
Show HN: Tool I created to covert tabular data to a 'pretty' table
https://dv.dbb1.dev
34 comments
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.
An example has been added!
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
[1] https://github.com/SheetJS/js-xlsx
+1. I'm using xlsx-js in the similar-ish tool I recently wrote: https://akx.github.io/d2d/
Thank you for the suggestion, I will look into the library!
You might also be interested in JExcel: 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.
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.
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 :)
An example has been added to the homepage to see what the output looks like!
Absolutely, the next build will have that.
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).
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.
It appears your tool does not support pipe-delimited data in the "data to table" choice. An example is:
HTH
a|1
b|2
c|3
HTH
Thank you for the feedback! Pipe and CSV are next on the list :)
Doesn't appear to be working for CSV? e.g.: https://dv.dbb1.dev/sheets/1a53b5aa-2b00-4f58-ad75-84a31dcde...
Thank you for testing it out, it doesn't have support yet, but it will soon!
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 ?
Is this for copying some poor visually formatted excel and have a clear view of it in your solution ?
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.
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
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
CSV support is coming within the next day!
I always used 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/sustai...
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/sustai...
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
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/313216/0000313216190...
iXBRL: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/313216/0000313216180...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBRL
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/313216/0000313216190...
iXBRL: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/313216/0000313216180...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBRL
I appreciate the feedback!
The unfortunate part of it is it's parsing the data based on the characters it finds in the text being processed, so if when you copy the data from your PDF reader, I'm guessing the data is positioned in the document using X/Y coordinates which is why it can't be formatted correctly.
I will definitely look at the document and see if my assumptions are incorrect, and if there is a different delimiter being used then it may be something I can work with.
The unfortunate part of it is it's parsing the data based on the characters it finds in the text being processed, so if when you copy the data from your PDF reader, I'm guessing the data is positioned in the document using X/Y coordinates which is why it can't be formatted correctly.
I will definitely look at the document and see if my assumptions are incorrect, and if there is a different delimiter being used then it may be something I can work with.
Was this complicated to others or easy to us - attached the 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/WESIYou 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
what is the difference with existing free BI tools with publish to web functionality?..
Unless you hit certain thresholds, this won’t require an account. It’s not designed to run analysis, only to simply share data.
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!