“Refresh” a CSV File

In a previous post I discussed a PDF reader that allows you to refresh the PDF after changes are made. This is the same concept except it’s for CSV files. I’ve been using Perl to convert sqlplus spool output to CSV which is much easier to read into R. As I’m updating my code and regenerating sample CSV files, it’s really annoying that Excel gets an exclusive lock on the file. So, I would open it in Notepad++ or vim, but it’s much harder in those tools to pick out the columns and rows to find errors.

CSVed to the rescue!!! Here’s the website for CSVed. It’s a great, simple CSV viewer / editor and it does not lock the file. You simply press the “reload” button or ctrl+r and it reloads the file. Again, so simple but so useful for my use-case.

“Refresh” a PDF

I’ve been working in R (wikipedia entry) a lot lately to graph performance data about Oracle systems. In general I output PDF files. The problem with most PDF readers (on Windows) is that they either get an exclusive lock on the file when it’s open (yes you, Adobe Acrobat), or you have to close and re-open the PDF to see any changes. Enter Sumatra PDF (wikipedia entry, home page). I’ve used on and off for a few years. It’s free, very lightweight & fast to start.

The key feature for this post is that when you open a PDF, it doesn’t get an exclusive lock on the file. So, when I re-run my R code to regenerate the PDF file, Sumatra changes the title bar to [Changes detected; refreshing]… and reloads the PDF when it no longer detects changes. Brilliant! Absolutely brilliant!

Here’s a screenshot:

Here’s a follow-up post on how to “Refresh a CSV File“