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I need to view (large) CSV files on my Mac. I could use something like OpenOffice, but unfortunately it's pretty big and slow. I'm wondering if there's a Mac equivalent of some of the Windows tools mentioned on this SU question.

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    Adding on my own remark about the slowness of OpenOffice: the new LibreOffice is a lot faster in starting up than the old Oracle version. Still a bit heavy for just viewing CSV files though.
    – Hay
    Feb 25, 2011 at 15:19

3 Answers 3

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Quick Look the file. There are two methods of doing so.

  1. Right click the file, in the context menu, select 'Quick Look "file you right-clicked"'.
  2. Click the file, keyboard shortcut Command-Y.
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    Probably the easiest way of doing this. Jun 11, 2012 at 2:59
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    also you can select the file and press "spacebar"
    – GusDeCooL
    Jun 28, 2013 at 22:14
  • Too slow on the latest MBP for CSV files even over a few MB...
    – Matt
    Sep 18, 2013 at 5:06
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    This is cool and all, but you can't even select data to copy/paste. Mar 9, 2018 at 0:48
  • And quicklook doesn't align the columns, so it's difficult to visually scan as a table.
    – scipilot
    May 15, 2021 at 3:04
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Update 7/24/2019

Commenter @Boris Yakubchik points out there's a new CSV app: Tablecruncher - tablecruncher.com . I have not tested it.

Update 4/13/2017

There's a new desktop app for viewing and analyzing CSV files on macOS: Tad.

Update 9/8/2016

There's a new cross-platform desktop app for viewing CSV files: Comma Chameleon.

Original answer

Open Refine weighs in at 50.6 MB, but I don't think that's the 'weight' you're interested in. Anyway I think it's a good tool for any size dataset. They make it faster by paginating the data.

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    This is the BEST tool to edit/refine/reformat CSV files. Period.
    – Landitus
    Feb 4, 2012 at 22:26
  • Very good indeed, but that's not what we can call lightweight
    – lajarre
    Jan 17, 2013 at 17:26
  • Google Refine is now archived. Can you suggest alternatives? Jan 14, 2016 at 6:49
  • @Manu Google no longer maintains Refine, but it's still available as an open source project: openrefine.org Jan 14, 2016 at 11:39
  • Chokes on a 2GB file.
    – logic-unit
    Aug 5, 2016 at 13:15
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Not sure how light-weight it is, but I found this with a quick Google search: XTabulator 2

XTabulator is a tabular data file editor for Mac OS X. With XTabulator, you can edit, manipulate, > massage, slice, and dice comma-separated (CSV), tab-separated (TAB), or anything-separated files quickly and easily.

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  • A note for others: Free version adds a line "Created by XTabulator" in every CSV you edit with it. Jan 14, 2016 at 6:51

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