The link is to the documentation and the app is freely available at https://visprex.com, and if you're curious about the implementation it's open source at https://github.com/visprex/visprex. I'd appreciate any comments and feedback!
One question I immediately have is how this compares to a spreadsheet CSV import tool such as the one in Excel which is extremely flexible. It appears that this app requires a specific format (comma delimited, new line at end of each row) in order to work. I never tried to count the times that a CSV file that I had to work with required editing in order to facilitate import to Excel or other application because CSV is such a non-standard standard output that the only way one could know whether the import would be successful was to pop it into an editor, like Notepad++ and examine it before import. Notepad++ was a critical tool in the chain to force compliance for all the different applications I used. Each application allowed CSV import/export but some accepted almost any delimiter while others were strict about file format and failing to understand the expected CSV format for each would definitely cause headaches as some input errors could leave a very subtle footprint that you may not catch until late in processing.
Anyway, it appears that your definition of CSV format is pretty strict so how do you propose that a user manage importation of files that do not fit your CSV definition? Notepad++ before import to verify compliance?
I also see one thing on the main page under "Security" that looks like it could be worded differently.
>No tracking or analytics software is used for privacy
To me, this implies that no steps have been taken to manage user/data privacy.
Perhaps a comma could be inserted so that it reads "...used, for privacy." or maybe it should read:
For (user/data) privacy, there is no tracking or analytics software.
I would say the data loading functionality compares very poorly to Excel CSV import for all the reasons you pointed out, and I agree that the users can face those formatting issues which could be resolved in another tool like Excel or Google Spreadsheet for non-technical users and Notepad++ or editors for a bit more technical users. The assumption on CSV files being clean is strong so I will try to surface import errors at least, and in the meantime point to different ways to format the data as those tools will be complementary to Visprex.
> To me, this implies that no steps have been taken to manage user/data privacy.
This is a good point. I fixed the wording and now it simply reads "No tracking or analytics software is used". Thanks!
Do you have any plans for data cleaning?
I am working on a somewhat similar open source project. I intend to add heuristic data cleaning. With the UI I want to be able to toggle between different strategies quickly - strip characters from a column to treat it as numeric, if less than 2% or 5% of values have a character, fill na with mean, interpret dates in different formats - drop if the date doesn't parse. The idea bing that if it's really quick to change between different strategies, you can create more opinionated strategies to get to the right answer faster.
Happy to collaborate and talk tables with anyone who's interested.
> With the UI I want to be able to toggle between different strategies quickly - strip characters from a column to treat it as numeric, if less than 2% or 5% of values have a character, fill na with mean, interpret dates in different formats - drop if the date doesn't parse
Those are really good examples and I can make those predefined preproccesing techniques available as toggles in the dataset tab. Thanks for the feedback!
edit: I see you're using an LLM, but " ~$8.40 per 1k records" sounds unsustainable.
Some of those plans are mentioned in my blog post reflecting on building this app: https://kengoa.github.io/software/2024/11/03/small-software....
Also a few typos you might want to review: https://triplechecker.com/s/823563/docs.visprex.com
Also thanks for the error checker! I pushed the fixes in https://github.com/visprex/visprex.github.io/pull/4
They seem to hate learning R, and while this doesn’t prevent them from having to build a model, this will speed up the exploration steps.
Maybe bar / beeswarm charts would be useful?
I was missing the possibility to show differences by category, eg mpg by make in the cars dataset.
Visualizing tabular data often presented some challenges, as I had to rely on tools like Google Sheets or Colab + Pandas for quick cleaning and wrangling before exploring different visualizations.
I think having more client-side data cleaning capabilities would make it even more powerful
Yes I had the same experience for analytics work some years ago. As others have pointed out, Visprex only works in a happy path where data is a clean CSV file so will definitely need to work on data cleaning. I have a DuckDB integration planned but not sure if this is easy enough for the target audience. Will try to add some predefinied functionalities, thanks for the feedback!
