
Show HN: Tool I created to covert tabular data to a 'pretty' table - dougbarrett
https://dv.dbb1.dev
======
dougbarrett
Creator here. I'm always running queries in Sequel Pro and pasting
screenshots, or pasting the data into an excel spreadsheet and uploading that
to slack for co-workers, because Slack doesn't have the ability to render
tables.

Yesterday, my screenshots weren't working at all when sharing them in slack,
and I couldn't find a tool out there that could take tabular data and convert
it to an easy to navigate table w/ an option to download as a CSV file, so I
made my own.

Let me know if you have any questions or comments!

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tastroder
If you find the time and mobile viewing is in scope, the site would benefit
from an example on the homepage for us mobile users that don't have a table
handy.

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bobbonew
Example, yes please!

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dougbarrett
An example has been added!

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somada141
I always used
[https://www.tablesgenerator.com](https://www.tablesgenerator.com) to quickly
render tabular data from SequelPro or Excel into LaTeX, Markdown, HTML etc.
I’ve found it to be an absolute time-saver.

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philshem
It's a pretty tool, but like the other comment says, it could use a
screenshot!

It's also not clear how long the link is active, or that we are even supposed
to share the link.

Also, hosting (open) data anonymously is a market niche (since pastebin have a
500kb size) but you may not want to become the anonymous data host for obvious
reasons.

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dougbarrett
I appreciate the feedback, my intention is absolutely to not become an
anonymous data website, the next iteration will require an e-mail address to
paste a link that lasts longer than 24 hours and you'll be e-mailed a sharing
link and a link to delete the 'sheet'. Future versions will include an admin
with a ton of other features and converstions.

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drej
Do you need to share small-sih tabular data and have some control over it? Use
Github's gists. Unless your data is quite large, it will render CSVs just
fine, allow for edits, comments, title, ... And it's in your account, so you
can keep track.

~~~
dougbarrett
I just tested it out and the gist works pretty well! It did confuse me for a
minute that it didn’t render the table view on mobile, and there is no way to
sort the columns as well.

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smartera
Nice tool. I was really hoping though it can help me tabulate messy copied
text data from PDF.

For example, from Philips 2018 annual report [0], I copy the income statement,
and I get the below when I paste. I found it impossible to get this into Excel
or any other table format, without writing a Python program for it. Your tool
still made it as one column. If there's a way you can automatically detect the
3 numeric columns below, you can have a large audience of finance folk
analyzing PDF documents.

Sales. 17,422 17,780 18,121 Cost of sales (9,484) (9,600) (9,568) Gross margin
7,939 8,181 8,554 Selling expenses (4,142) (4,398) (4,500) General and
administrative expenses (658) (577) (631) Research and development expenses
(1,669) (1,764) (1,759) 6 Other business income. 17 152 88 6 Other business
expenses. (23) (76) (33) 6 Income from operations. 1,464 1,517 1,719 7
Financial income. 65 126 51 7 Financial expenses. (507) (263) (264)
Investments in associates, net of income taxes 11 (4) (2) Income before taxes
1,034 1,377 1,503 8 Income tax expense. (203) (349) (193) Income from
continuing operations 831 1,028 1,310 3 Discontinued operations, net of income
taxes. 660 843 (213) Net income 1,491 1,870 1,097 Attribution of net income
Net income attributable to Koninklijke Philips N.V. shareholders 1,448 1,657
1,090 Net income attributable to non-controlling interests 43 214 7

[0] [https://www.philips.com/c-dam/corporate/about-
philips/sustai...](https://www.philips.com/c-dam/corporate/about-
philips/sustainability/downloads/other/philips-full-annual-report-2018.pdf)

~~~
bonyt
Tabula is a helpful tool for extracting tables from PDFs, although its more
for large tables of data, often spanning many pages, rather than the odd copy-
and-paste.

[https://tabula.technology](https://tabula.technology)

As for your specific example, you can download tables from EDGAR in other
formats, like HTML and iXBRL. The HTML table will usually paste into Excel
well.

HTML:
[https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/313216/0000313216190...](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/313216/000031321619000007/phg-20181231.htm#tx20644616-statements)

iXBRL:
[https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/313216/0000313216180...](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/313216/000031321618000007/phg-20171231_htm.xml)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBRL](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBRL)

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seektable
what is the difference with existing free BI tools with publish to web
functionality?..

~~~
dougbarrett
Unless you hit certain thresholds, this won’t require an account. It’s not
designed to run analysis, only to simply share data.

