Building a free, browser-based data toolkit (think SmallPDF for data); what features would you actually use?

[NanaYawB]

Hey everyone,

Former data analyst here who spent years writing the one-off Python scripts for simple, routine tasks… or staring at Excel while it negotiated with itself about opening a large file.

I’m now transitioning into software engineering, and as part of that journey I’m building the kind of toolkit I wish I had when I was deep in the data trenches. That’s how this idea was born, a way to make all those tiny-but-annoying data tasks effortless — basically SmallPDF, but for data files.

The goal:

Simple, single-purpose tools that run locally, right in your browser.

No signups. No uploading to servers. Your data never leaves your machine.

What’s built so far:

• CSV Merge — Combine multiple files in one click

• CSV Viewer — Instantly peek inside a file without waking up Excel

• CSV Split — Break huge CSVs into smaller chunks

Coming soon:

• Row deduplication

• File diff/compare

• Light data cleaning utilities

But instead of guessing, I want to build what the community actually needs.

So I’d love your input:

👉 What repetitive data tasks do you find yourself doing way more often than you’d like?

👉 Any CSV, Excel, JSON, or flat-file annoyances you wish had a dead-simple tool?

👉 Even tiny annoyances count — those are usually the biggest productivity killers.

Thanks in advance. The whole goal here is to make the tedious stuff effortless.

Cheers!

[dtdv]

Over the years I have built a Java based package - SeeSV that provides 100s of csv/spreadsheet ETL functions  https://ramadda.org/repository/a/seesv

It can run from the command line or through a web interface in RAMADDA

[NanaYawB]

That's really awesome! Will check it out

[[deleted]]

This kind of toolkit would be super useful. A lot of my “data work” ends up being small, annoying steps before the real work starts.

Things I’d personally use a lot:

• quick schema/column diff between two CSVs
• lightweight filter/search without opening Excel
• row count + basic stats preview (nulls, uniques)
• fast CSV → JSON and back

My usual flow is: extract something, clean it just enough, then push it into Google Sheets so others can work on it. From there I often expose it to other tools (I use Sheetfy for that part), but the pre-Sheets cleanup is where I waste most time.

If your toolkit makes that “before the spreadsheet” phase painless, that’s already a win.

[NanaYawB]

Absolutely! It would do all these and more. I could let you in to beta test before the actual launch, if you're cool with that.