We built a tool to help non-technical folk transform their data into useful formats for BI (https://www.data-monkey.com). The tool currently supports JSON, CSV, Excel and text files, and comes with features to merge/filter/transform data. It's free to try and use if you're interested - we'd love to hear your feedback!
Hello, author here! At my last “day job”, I spent far too much time designing interfaces between common data formats (i.e. flat files -> JSON or JSON -> Excel) –– I felt like I was doing the same work ad nauseam. In general, all I needed to do was pull out a fraction of the data, validate that data against a set of expectations (there’s always surprises), and maybe filter out certain values or make a few changes (like combining columns). Anybody can do all of this manually or via code easily enough, but there had to be a better way: I wanted to cut down on the monkey work.
Data Monkey is a web application that allows you to upload a small sample of your input data and define exactly how you want it to be transformed in a step-by-step process. You can then transform any number of files with the workflow you designed –– via our servers or locally on your own machine using our open-sourced Python library ().
This has been a work of passion for me — I think developers and business experts have better ways to spend time than worrying about finagling their data into the correct format. I’d love to hear your feedback and suggestions for improvement!
P.S. For fun (if you’re a data geek like me), check out the Analyze Data functionality… it will scan the first million rows of any supported file and give you a bunch of interesting metrics on the data. It will also look for “data anomalies”, like missing entries in a sequence or duplicates. I use it to get a first look & understanding of unfamiliar files I need to work with.
