CsvPath To Excel

What data format is more important to you, CSV or Excel?

It’s often hard to say. They cover different needs and have different opportunities. At the same time, they are more than just fellow travelers. Today, they have one new thing in common — CsvPath validation.

Yes, as of this morning, you can run CsvPath validation rules against Excel files.

As a single point of data, of the 295,114 datasets available today on data.gov, 25,677 are CSV. A mere 8,086 (an excellently geeky number!) are Excel files. But that doesn’t tell the whole story, of course. Excel dominates desktop data work like nothing else. The files are smaller, crazier, full of errors and weirdness, and oh-my-gosh what a lot of them there are! It’s important that CsvPath is able to enable some governance.

Earlier this year a study brought this gripping headline:

Study finds 94% of business spreadsheets have critical errors

You can read more about what they found here. It’s not a pretty story. But you weren’t expecting pretty when the topic of Excel came up.

How can CsvPath help? Simple! Xlsx files are just tabular data. Yes, we use them a bit more flamboyantly, but in the end, all styling and macros aside, the content is headers above columns of values. Your CsvPath rules work out of the box. No changes needed. You can even save a sample of your Xlsx and upload it to CsvPath AutoGen to get a jump start on how you might validate the content.

We see businesses trading Excel files almost as often as raw CSV files. A DataOps architecture and culture, and data governance isn’t always available. If you need a framework for running automated validation there are many options. We would be happy to talk options with you.

We need to constantly learn about user’s real world data governance needs. A little free consulting time is well work it to us. Please reach out. We’d love to talk!