Explore with Visidata

There are number of options when exploring data containing tens of columns and hundreds or thousands of rows. The best known and most common tool, almost the default go-to is Excel. But for a quick exploration without leaving the PowerShell terminal, the blazing fast Visidata is ideal.

Open Purchase Orders

Fetch the grid data from Work With Purchase Orders to Receive (P4312).

$pos = submit-celin.ais.query "w4312f zjde0001 -max no"

For Visidata to accept the result, the data must be converted to one of the forms it recognises, in this case we use JSON.

$pos.data.grid.detail.totable($pos.data.grid.header.names) | convertto-json | vd -f json

The above command uses the ToTable(string[] columns) method of the Detail to convert it to table with the Name property (alias). This is then piped to the ConvertTo-Json command and then finally piped to Visidata with the format options (-f) set to JSON.