User Friendly Data Cleaning

Question

I feel kind of silly asking this, but I need a GUI tool for data cleaning.

An executive has offered to take over some of my data cleaning work if I can simplify the tasks. I've been using R to clean the data and Awk to split it, which is beyond his technical ability or interest. I offered to write a Python script that does everything in one shot, he'd rather have a GUI.

All of our data is in CSV files, most of which have ~10 columns and < 2,000 rows. The cleaning involves removing some rows, adding a few others, and splitting them up into CSV files by column values (date, in this case). The output is usually a dozen CSV files of "clean" data.

Are there any user-friendly tools for CSV editing & splitting? Excel destroys our data, so that's out. I'm looking at Google Refine, I think that could be a good option but I'm not sure that it will split the data.

Has anyone else faced the issue of needing user-friendly tools for data cleaning? I've done a few searches for data cleaning tools but haven't turned up anything.

Answer 1

Try csved. It can handle all kinds of CSV data and should be able to do what you need.