ESSENTIAL READING

VisiData is an incredibly robust and featureful utility and we can’t cover a thorough usage in this tutorial due to space constraints. While many of its features, such as creating pivot tables, will be of use only to seasoned operators, this project features a lot of documentation that will be of use to novice and experienced users alike.

Your VisiData journey must begin with the ‘An Introduction to VisiData’ tutorial. This is split into different sections, such as The Big Picture, Basic Usage, Intermediate Usage and so on. Once you have VisiData installed on your machine, make sure you go through the Basic Usage section of the tutorial. This providers a good introduction to opening and closing files, saving sheets, manipulating rows and columns, sorting and filtering data, and more. The section on Intermediate Usage covers some of the advanced features, such as joining sheets and reshaping data by creating pivot tables, and more, while the Advanced Usage section is still under development. Even so, you’ll appreciate the section on configuring VisiData. It’s also possible to extend VisiData with plugins.

Although there’s a dedicated subreddit for VisiData, you’ll be better served raising queries on the GitHub page. Make sure you go through all the solved and open issues, as there’s a good chance that your specific query has already been addressed.

For more detailed information, head over to www.visidata.org/docs to master the different components of VisiData and how to get the most out of them.