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DataTray

Read-only, always

Data Explorer

The tile that changes nothing. Open the file Excel refused, look at the rows, then look at the columns — what every one of them actually holds, where the nulls and the mixed types and the outliers are, and what is wrong with the file before you build anything on top of it.

Windows 10/11 (x64) · Free · No account

Nothing here writes to your file. Exports and reports land in DataTray's own output folder, and your original is untouched.

A single brightly lit band of readable rows held inside a vast dark wall of data.

What you can do

What people use it for — Data Explorer

The jobs this one actually gets opened for.

  • Opening a multi-gigabyte export that Excel will not load at all.
  • Working out why a CSV opened as a single column in every other tool.
  • Profiling a vendor's file before you trust it — nulls, types, ranges, duplicates.
  • Producing a data dictionary for a schema decision you have to justify to someone.
  • Running a quick SQL query across a CSV and a Parquet file without installing anything.

What it does

Everything Data Explorer handles

Everything this tool handles, and how it handles it.

Rows, at any file size

The grid pages against the file on disk rather than loading it into memory, so a file with tens of millions of rows scrolls like a small one. Filters and sorts re-run against the file, not against a loaded array.

It shows you its guess

“Detected: semicolon-delimited, UTF-8 with BOM, header on row 1” — stated on screen and every part overridable. The commonest CSV complaint is a file that opened as one column; the fix is to make the guess visible rather than silent.

Profile every column

Inferred type and semantic role — email, phone, date, currency, postcode, ID — plus nulls, distinct counts, min/max/mean/median, quartiles, the top ten values and a distribution sparkline.

A quality score that shows its working

A 0–100 headline over five weighted dimensions, and the weights are printed in the report. It is measured against the file's own shape, never a benchmark, and it says “38% of phone values do not match any phone pattern” rather than “your data is bad”.

A data dictionary you can hand over

One row per column — name, type, semantic role, null percentage, distinct count, range, samples, and a description field you can edit. Exports to .xlsx and to a Frictionless Table Schema .json.

SQL, if you want it

Query files where they lie — SELECT straight FROM a path, join a CSV to a Parquet file, save a view so a path becomes a name. Read-only, with no http:// or s3:// reachable, so SQL pasted off the internet cannot become an exfiltration path.

How it works

From your file to the result

  1. 1

    Drop the file in

    CSV, TSV, a fixed-width extract, an Excel workbook, a JSON or NDJSON file, or a whole folder of Parquet.

  2. 2

    Read the rows, then the columns

    Start in the grid. When something looks wrong, the Columns tab tells you how wrong and how many rows are affected — and “Show me these rows” jumps straight back to them.

  3. 3

    Take the report

    Export exactly what you are looking at — current filter, current columns — or generate the profile report and the data dictionary.

Under the hood

Formats, limits and defaults

Data Explorer never modifies a source file. Its only writes are the exports and reports you ask for.

Reads
CSV, TSV, PSV, fixed-width, XLSX, XLS, XLSB, Parquet, JSON, NDJSON, JSONL, XML
Exports
CSV, XLSX, Parquet, JSON — whatever is on screen, filters and column selection included
Reports
Data Profile & Quality Report (HTML + .xlsx) and the Data Dictionary (.xlsx + Table Schema .json)
Engine
An embedded analytical query engine, bundled in the installer — nothing to set up
Network
None. Extensions never auto-download and remote filesystems are switched off

Because this tile is interactive, Watch Folders will not propose it and a recipe cannot contain it. Profiling is something you read, not something that should run unattended.

The rest of the belt

The other four tools

Questions

Data Explorer, answered

Get it free — Data Explorer

Data Explorer ships in DataTray, free for Windows 10 and 11. No account, and nothing uploads.

Windows 10/11 (x64) · Free · No account