Stitching tables together, simple data cleaning, keeping track of changes and documenting meta-data
What does it do?
The Table Stitcher helps you putting many data tables that are not (entirely) uniformly structured into one or a few tables.
While doing this, it will keep track of how you did it, and which edits you made. It also allows you to do simple data cleaning, to easily create metadata, and to further document all the steps with additional notes.
This way, you will be able to reproduce the result and/or provide the data needed for later reviewing or quality control. Also, if at a later stage you discover that you made a mistake, it will be easy to repair and generate a new version.
Possible users
Table Stitcher can be a useful tool for people who work with historical data, time series or panel data. Typically, these are historians, economic historians, sociologists or people in biology or other fields where data production is repeated but not always in exactly the same way.
More background reading
For an introduction to the problem that the Table Stitcher solves and an outline of how it does that, see here.
Free download of v. 0.9.1 Beta
In June 2021, the first beta release is ready for free download.
You will need FileMaker Pro v. 19 installed on your computer. (v. 16, 17 and 18 might work as well, but not guaranteed)
Because of a couple of bugs that I discovered today (23 June 2021) I decided to not further distribute this Beta. Instead of fixing the bugs, I am planning to re-work the package based on the feedback that I received so far.
The zip includes a ‘read.me’ that you can also read here.
Please provide me with your feedback, either in the comments below or by writing me an email ( frank_drv at icloud dot com ). Everyone providing serious feedback will be rewarded with a free license to future versions.
Table Stitcher can only deal with data that is expressed as text and will only export data as text. Data expressed as text includes numbers, times and dates, but not audio, video, and images. Also, formulas in spreadsheets can not be imported as formulas. Instead, the result values of the formulas are imported and exported.
At present, the maximum number of columns for import and export is 104. In spreadsheet terms, the last column that is imported is CZ.
What next?
Depending on the responses that I get, I will decide on whether to continue with this project and if ‘yes’, how? You will find updates on this page. If you send me an email, I will inform you about updates.
Below you will find a roadmap with planned new features, bugs and other issues that people already have mentioned, or that I have come up with myself in the meantime.
Next version
• Import for upgrade
The current version allows for exporting of all data for migration to a new version. The new version should be able to import that data. Once in place, this function can also be used to create backups of the data and to manage different projects.
Further down the road
• Exporting formatted data in .xlsx
Table Stitcher exports all data as text into tab-text, coma separated values (.csv), or .xls x files. Even in .xlsx all data will be formatted as text. So in your spreadsheet software, you will have to manually set cell-formatting to the desired format, or try its import function to automatically determine the format. Perhaps it is possible to export formatted data to .xlsx files.
Frank van der Most 