Musings from Mars Banner Image
For Software Addicts: Yes!MaybeNah!
Mars Report:

XTabulator: Manage Tabulated Data Without Excel

Published February 19th, 2007

XTabulator: Easily Manage Your Tabulated Data Files

XTabulator softwareOriginally downloaded 4/3/06. This sure sounds useful! It’s an all-purpose tool for managing CSV, TSV, and other ASCII files of tabular data. Heck, I knew we were relying on spreadsheets for too much these days. Someone else did, too! This is shareware with a 30-day free trial, which I’m gonna take.

Update 2/19/07. Actually, after trying out XTabulator and several other spreadsheet-type apps I’ve concluded that XTabulator simply doesn’t have enough functionality to be useful to me. At only $10, I’m sure it meets the needs of certain kinds of tabular-data maintenance tasks, but I need something that can handle textual data side by side with numerical data, as well as something that can accept pasted data to create a new table. Oh, and unfortunately it’s still required to be able to read and write Microsoft Excel files, but XTabulator can’t do this. Neither can it export files to HTML. Still, it’s a nice little Cocoa application with a pleasant interface and great icon!

XTabulator's Main Window

Pros

Cons

  • Converts between Tab- and Comma-delimited files
  • Can easily open this kind or other delimited tabular data files in ASCII format
  • Once in XTabulator, you can easily add records, rows, and sort the rows by any column.
  • Includes an autofill feature, but this seems pretty lame since it doesn’t allow for any dynamic content.
  • You can drag columns around.
  • No conversion to HTML
  • Can’t paste a CSV or TD file into XTabulator to create a new document.
  • Not good for managing textual information, since the cells don’t handle multiline content. It can store such content, but you can’t easily edit it. Unlike DevonThink’s sheets structure, the row doesn’t widen to reveal all the content.
  • Can’t open or save to Excel format.

Version as tested: 1.1.2.

    
  • del.icio.us
  • Google
  • Slashdot
  • Technorati
  • blogmarks
  • Tumblr
  • Digg
  • Facebook
  • Mixx

Show Comments
Just Say No To Flash