Messing with data? Try this...

[oblivion]

My very favourite, relatively obscure, software package right now is EasyDataTransform.

It's commercial, and enough money that a normal user might think twice about it (but not so much that it's clearly a commercial-only program.)

However, if you have data that you want to chop up, tidy up, transform in any way, I have never ever seen anything as fast, effective, or easy to use.

Things -- transformations -- you'd have to write almost incomprehensible code in Excel, SQL, whatever -- to achieve, are pretty much drag and drop and a checkbox or three.

I've used it to create a simple set of transformations that has saved several hours work kicking a particular automatically produced dataset into shape. What took a morning now takes about 2 minutes.

It might not be something you need. But if you ever have to work with -- in particular -- comma separated files, or spreadsheets that just contain data in columns, it could transform (sorry) your life.

I have no connection with it, by the way, just a happy user.

[highend]

Nice one. Not really cheap but for someone who needs to aggregate data easily worth the price (and no, I'm not affiliated with them either)^^