What is the best CSV Editor? - CSV Editing

5/8/2024    

The Search Begins

If you are reading this page, it is probably because you searched for 'best CSV editor' or 'best free CSV editor' on the internet. After reviewing the results of, say, the first 10 appropriately titled pages, you will begin to notice a pattern. The pages roughly fall into these categories:

• Articles written by the vendor of said CSV editor.

After all, why not extol the virtues of your product?

• Articles titled 'X best CSV editors 20XX'.

These are usually regurgitating the same standard list of CSV editors, presumably copied from an ultimate source article since lost in the mists of internet history. They seem to be identical year after year, implying that every new year the title gets updated even if the content does not.

• Articles titled 'X best free CSV editors 20XX'.

As above, there seems to be a lot of cross pollination between these articles but with one key difference: any CSV vendor that dares to actually charge money for their editor is ostracized . . . except, curiously, when they are not. After some time in the business we came to realize that the vendors whose software product ranked #1 actually pay $1000's to be there.

• Real articles or posts often written with a use case in mind.

These are easy to spot because they actually, you know, look real and contain useful information not lifted verbatim from the vendors web site.

Where do we Stand?

That's easy. We are in the first category: we are a vendor.

So, rather immodestly, we think that our product, Rons Data Edit, is the best CSV editor. We are the ones who created it so we don't actually expect anyone to believe us.

Actually, that's why we provide a free Lite version of our software so that our customers can make up their own minds in their own time. It loads anything and its only limitation is that it stops saving if the row count exceeds 2500. We also offer a free Pro license trial that removes the limitation.

If, after reading further and/or trying other CSV editors, you think our claim is misguided, please tell us why.

We also think we stand up well against our . . .

Competition

We would never want our customers to buy our product, without being fully aware of what the market has to offer, so here is a list of our key competitors.

Referring back to the start of the article, we searched for 'what is the best CSV editor', and voila - here they are. We have not included all of the offerings out there because, honestly, some just did not make the cut. If you think we have unfairly excluded a competitor, please let us know. Even if you are the competitor ;-).

These products are competent and worthwhile, some taking a slightly different approach to CSV editing than Rons Place Software, or specializing in certain areas, but all are worthy of the title of 'competitor'.

Direct Competition

Indirect Competition

(See our article A Perfect Excel Alternative to handle CSV Files)

Feature Comparison

Honestly, who's got the time? I mean, if we make a big list of things we do better than our competitors it just makes us look petty anyway right ;-)?

So why do we think we are the best?

History

One of the first reasons why we think Rons Data Edit is the best CSV Editor comes directly from our experience building it (roughly 15 years). We started creating our first editor, Rons CSV Editor, around 2010 and it has kept on evolving and improving until 2021 when we decided that we had to rebuild it from the ground up in order to keep up with new technologies and requests from our customers.

The result was Rons Data Edit, which replaced Rons CSV Editor.

Rons Data Edit not only contained 10 years worth of features and learning from Rons CSV Editor, but combined 15 years worth of feedback, new technology, and a chance at a fresh clean start. The result is awesome . . . or at least we think so.

Now

We have aimed to make the job of editing CSV files as easy as possible by keeping in mind during design and testing that the Rons Data Edit is for editing data tables, and that fundamentally our product is a text editor. Even though features like filtering and sorting work on dates or numbers, we don't forget that the source is text, and the product reflects that throughout.

Rons Data Edit has been designed to be powerful but simple to use. In fact a large amount of effort has gone into making the user interface do what is expected, and behave in a standard way, so that our customers can find features easily and quickly.

That is not to say that we have sacrificed any power or capabilities, we have just made it easy to use. For a list of features, see the Rons Data Edit features page.

Product Evolution (our customers feedback)

Aside from our devotion to design and quality, our customers have also played a fundamental role in the shaping of the product; many of the features that are in Rons Data Edit have been directly requested and, if a feature is missing, it's probably because it has not been asked for.

A lot of our more advanced customers use more than one CSV editor. In fact, they use all sorts of tools, and Rons Data Edit is a very valuable part of their toolkit. Consequently, over the years we have had a lot of feedback that our product did not do what 'CSV editor X' did, or 'text editor Y' did, or 'web site Z' did.

How did we respond? Well, we listened to all that feedback and added it into our product. Not directly plagiarized mind you, but in Rons Place Software style.

For example, someone asked for bookmarks after seeing the feature in another CSV editor. We did not add bookmarks, but leveraged an existing feature called 'Construct'. "Constructs" are manually created views or snapshots of a CSV file, to enable the customer to 'set aside' a list of rows and jump to the original row at the click of a button. The best part? It scales beautifully for large documents.

Add in all the other feedback we have had over the last 10+ years, and we have one very competent CSV editor.

Finally

If you need a professional CSV editor, give Rons Data Edit a try, and let us know what you think.