August 1, 2013 (Vol. 33, No. 14)
URL:
http://vis.stanford.edu/wrangler
Rating:
Strong Points: Nice demo video, can export scripts
Weak Points: No “how-to” beyond demo video, not recently updated
Summary:
If you’re looking for a way to organize unruly numerical data, DataWrangler might be able to help. Developed by the Stanford Visualization Group, DataWrangler is a nice online tool to clean up your datasets. The three example datasets on the website give users an opportunity to explore DataWrangler’s capabilities, though the demo video on the homepage is probably the best place to start. (It also happens to be the only form of instruction on the website—users are by and large left to themselves to figure things out.) After wrangling unformatted datasets into nicely organized spreadsheets, users can subsequently export their data into analysis programs such as Excel. Techies will be pleased to know that users can also export the scripts (either Python or JavaScript format) underlying DataWrangler’s data transformations.