Excel for Mac performed well but it is a paid solution so I did not consider it viable for many developers.
Google Sheets worked for some files but would tend to crash or hang past a certain file size. It has a hard row limit that seemed to be independent of file size. If you would like to skip the story and go straight to the best free solution, please click here. I’m using a 2018 Macbook Pro with a 2.6 GHz 6-core i7 and 16 GB of RAM. In this post, I’ve outlined the different ways I’ve tried to manipulate large CSVs and their results. A good text editor can open these large CSVs but you lose spreadsheet capabilities like rearranging columns and filtering data. I set out to figure out how to open and manipulate these files in a free and somewhat accessible way that was fast and didn’t risk crashes.Īs a software engineer with a history of supporting marketing teams, I often encounter extremely large datasets including customer segment exports or analytics event logs that can be larger than a gigabyte. Have you ever struggled to open and manipulate a large CSV file on a Mac? 100MB? 1 gigabyte or greater? Extremely large CSVs bring most spreadsheet utilities to a halt or the computer. How To Open & Manipulate Large (>100MB) CSV Files On A Mac
