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Table Tools

A few quick utilities for reshaping and tidying the active table.

Transpose

Analyse > Transpose... swaps rows and columns into a new tab. The original column names become the first column, and each original row becomes a column. Everything is shown as text, since a transposed mix of column types has no single type.

Transpose is limited to tables of at most 1000 rows, because each row becomes a column and a very wide result would be unusable. Above that limit the status bar tells you instead of running.

Random sample

Analyse > Random sample... opens a small dialog where you type a row count (100 by default). It then opens a new tab holding that many rows, chosen at random from the active table. This is handy for eyeballing a fair cross-section of a big file without scrolling all of it. If you ask for more rows than the table has, you get them all.

Tidy up

Data > Tidy up... cleans the current table in a single undoable step. Two options:

  • Trim spaces from cells and headers (on by default): removes leading and trailing spaces from text cells and column titles. Spaces inside a value are left alone.
  • Tidy column names to snake_case (off by default): lowercases column names and replaces runs of punctuation or spaces with a single underscore.

A single Undo reverts the whole thing. Octa can already do this automatically when opening a file; this lets you run it at any time.

When a cell holds a web address (http:// or https://), Octa shows it as an underlined link. Ctrl+click opens it in your browser; a plain click still selects the cell as usual.

Because Ctrl+click also toggles a cell in a multi-cell selection, on a link cell the Ctrl+click opens the link instead of toggling that one cell. You can turn the whole feature off with Settings > Table View > Clickable web links.