Quick Start

Welcome to Tad!

If you are reading this message, Tad has been succesfully installed.

Launching Tad

There are three ways to launch Tad:

1. From the Command Line

   During installation Tad installs a symbolic link to the application in /usr/local/bin/tad. If you are working in the shell (and have /usr/local/bin on your PATH), simply type:

   $ tad somefile.csv
   

   to launch Tad to explore somefile.csv. You can also open .tad files (previously saved Tad view configurations) via the command line.
2. Application Icon

   You can double click on the Tad application icon in /Applications in the Finder or the dock to open Tad. Use File...Open and the standard file open dialog to open a .csv or .tad file.

3. Finder Context Menu or Drag and Drop

The installation process registers Tad as a viewer for .csv files. On any .csv file in the Finder, use Open With... and select Tad.app to open the file in Tad.

Basic Usage

When you open a CSV file in Tad, Tad automatically imports your CSV file into an internal in-memory SQLite database. You can see the result of this import process by clicking on the gear icon on the left of the Tad window:

This will open the sidebar:

Tad scans your data file during the import process makes a conservative guess at the type of each column. For now the only supported types are text, integer and real, and there is no facility for manually overriding the inferred types.

The name and type of each column are shown in the main Column Selector above. The additional controls in the column selector enable you to quickly build a pivot table to explore your data set:

• Use the checkboxes under Pivot in the main column selector to choose columns for the pivot hierarchy.
• Use the checkboxes under Show in the main column selector to determine what columns are shown / hidden.
• Set the sort columns using either the checkboxes under Sort the main column selector or by clicking on column headers in the main grid.

Additional controls for setting the order of columns, pivots and the sort key, and controlling aggregation and formatting rules are available under Additional Properties at the bottom of the side bar.

Data Sources

If you work in data science, chances are you have no shortage of CSV files of your own to explore. If you don't have any CSVs readily available, a few of my favorite data sources on the Internet are:

• Kaggle Datasets. The movie_metadata.csv file used for many Tad examples is from the IMDB 5000 Movie Dataset.
• data.world is a site for sharing and exploring data on a variety of topics.
• The FiveThirtyEight github repository has many CSV files providing data behind the stories and interactives on the FiveThirtyEight web site.

Going Further (Developers and Data Hackers)

If for some reason you want to see the gnarly details of the SQL queries that Tad is constructing and executing, you can use the -f option on the command line to keep Tad in the foreground and --show-queries to get Tad to print the generated SQL queries like so:

$ tad -f --show-queries somefile.csv

Not for the faint-hearted.

And Finally...

Have fun! I hope you find Tad a useful utility for viewing and analyzing data. Feedback welcome.