Flat File Checker is a free data validation software to validate data in flat files. You can use this free tool to validate data in csv, txt, and other flat file formats. You can specify validation rules on the fields, and Flat File Checker will find if some data does not meets those rules. For example, if your file has a phone number field, you can specify that it should have only numbers and “-“. Similarly, age field should have only numbers, and so on.
Apart from the simple validation examples I gave above, Flat File Checker can also do complex validations, like, checking for duplicate records, checking for relational accuracy of data, regular expressions, and more.
How to Use Flat File Checker to validate CSV and TXT Files:
- Flat File Checker is extremely simple to use. You start with downloading and installing Flat File Checker.
- The interface of Flat File Checker has two panes. In the left pane you can drag and drop any flat file that you want to check. While doing that, you can specify if your file has a header row. You can also specify if your tab is delimited by some character, or does it have fixed width fields.
- Once you do that, Right pane will show all the fields from the file.
- To add rule to a field, just click on that field. This will bring up the rule builder. Here you can specify validation rules associated with that field. Like, you can check for field length, specify list of possible values, duplicates, and so on.
- Once you have specified rules on all the fields that you want to validate, you can run the validation. This will check all the data in your flat file against those rules, and will let you know if some of the data has errors.
- You can even store the correct data in a different file.
Also check out CSV editors like CSVStar, and CSVed.
Flat File Checker is very easy to use, and makes it very easy to validate data in flat files. Some people think that flat files are not used anymore, and everything is done via Excels. But that is not the case, especially in case of businesses. I deal with Flat files everyday in my office, and a tool like this will definitely come handy.
Download Flat File Checker FlaFi free.
