Show HN: Visprex – Open-source, in-browser data visualisation tool for CSV files

Looks nice. I've had occasion to import/export, edit, etc. thousands of CSV files from multiple software platforms over the years and this tool looks like a simple way for a user to determine whether there are issues in the CSV file that will cause problems on import to their application.

One question I immediately have is how this compares to a spreadsheet CSV import tool such as the one in Excel which is extremely flexible. It appears that this app requires a specific format (comma delimited, new line at end of each row) in order to work. I never tried to count the times that a CSV file that I had to work with required editing in order to facilitate import to Excel or other application because CSV is such a non-standard standard output that the only way one could know whether the import would be successful was to pop it into an editor, like Notepad++ and examine it before import. Notepad++ was a critical tool in the chain to force compliance for all the different applications I used. Each application allowed CSV import/export but some accepted almost any delimiter while others were strict about file format and failing to understand the expected CSV format for each would definitely cause headaches as some input errors could leave a very subtle footprint that you may not catch until late in processing.

Anyway, it appears that your definition of CSV format is pretty strict so how do you propose that a user manage importation of files that do not fit your CSV definition? Notepad++ before import to verify compliance?

I also see one thing on the main page under "Security" that looks like it could be worded differently.

>No tracking or analytics software is used for privacy

To me, this implies that no steps have been taken to manage user/data privacy.

Perhaps a comma could be inserted so that it reads "...used, for privacy." or maybe it should read:

For (user/data) privacy, there is no tracking or analytics software.

Nice work!

Do you have any plans for data cleaning?

I am working on a somewhat similar open source project. I intend to add heuristic data cleaning. With the UI I want to be able to toggle between different strategies quickly - strip characters from a column to treat it as numeric, if less than 2% or 5% of values have a character, fill na with mean, interpret dates in different formats - drop if the date doesn't parse. The idea bing that if it's really quick to change between different strategies, you can create more opinionated strategies to get to the right answer faster.

Happy to collaborate and talk tables with anyone who's interested.

Are you planning to add xlsx support?

Also a few typos you might want to review: https://triplechecker.com/s/823563/docs.visprex.com

I loaded a CSV with one date/time column and one numerical column. I then selected “Scatter Plot”, but got the message “Not enough numerical columns found. Load a CSV file with at least 2 numerical columns in the Datasets tab.” I would have thought that a date/time column would count?

Cool! Does anyone know of any javascript libraries that I could use to get this type of distribution visualisation from tabular data? Something I can run on my site that is.

I like this a lot- I am going to show it to my students!

They seem to hate learning R, and while this doesn’t prevent them from having to build a model, this will speed up the exploration steps.

I typically fire up GnuPlot and there CSV loading and a plot are one line each. What does Visprex do more or better?

Very cool stuff!

Maybe bar / beeswarm charts would be useful?

I was missing the possibility to show differences by category, eg mpg by make in the cars dataset.

cool project!

Visualizing tabular data often presented some challenges, as I had to rely on tools like Google Sheets or Colab + Pandas for quick cleaning and wrangling before exploring different visualizations.

I think having more client-side data cleaning capabilities would make it even more powerful