It often occurs to me that if I had a good tool for viewing CSV data in graphical format, and comparing two sets of numbers to each other, I could do a great deal of meaningful trend watching and data interpretation.
For example, perfmon can output quite a lot of data about a server into a CSV file, but there's no good way to view it. A lot of scripts could/have been written that would populate CSV files. I could write these all day long.
My problem is that I need a great viewer. I've seen quite a few things that will take a CSV file and after a lot of tweaking and user adjustment produce a static gif/png image. A static image doesn't do me a lot of good, because I have to look at it, then re-calibrate the parameters of the program, regenerate the image, repeat. That sucks. I could do this in Excel.
Ideally, I would want a FLUID graph viewer. On the fly, I can adjust how much of my timeline I'm viewing. I could adjust the scaling so that one big spike doesn't make 99.9% of the data an unreadable line across the bottom of the X axis. Stuff like that. I should be able to say "show me CSV column 3 and column 5 as graphs. Show me the data scaled for 20 or 150 entries, and let me slide that window up and down the column of data. Auto scale to fit 95% of data within the Y axis and let crazy spikes go off the screen."
Maybe I'm terribly spoiled by how you can drag, zoom, and slide data around on my iPad. I want to be able to view a spreadsheet of data with that fluidity and not have to guess at what sort of static snapshot I want to create from it. I don't want to have to make a study of how to tweak some data plotting program to let me import my file and do what I could just do in Excel. I want to scale, zoom, and transform my graph on the fly and then export a snapshot of it once I have it the way I want it.
Is there anything out there that fills this need? I'll take linux, osx, win32 or even iOS suggestions.
