Automate the work you repeat.

Clean, transform, compare and automate your tabular data — without uploading it anywhere.

Join the wishlist See how it works

Start with CSV. Excel (XLSX) is planned.

Coming soon for Windows, macOS and Linux.

Local-firstFiles never leave your computer
DeterministicSame input, same output, every time
No accountNothing to sign up for or sign in to

The Rote CSV studio: a table of orders with columns for Order ID, customer name, date, amount, status, channel and region. A toolbar above offers Filter, Find empty rows, Find duplicate, Add column, Rename column, Move column, Delete column, Change values and Sort. — Your file opens in a grid. Every change is shown before anything is written, and the original file is never modified.

How it works

Do the work once. Save it. Repeat it.

Most file cleaning is the same handful of fixes, every week, on a new file. Rote remembers the fixes so you only make them once.

01OpenOpen a CSV. Rote reads the rows, columns, encoding and delimiter for you.
02CleanFix what is wrong — blank rows, duplicates, column names, order. See every change before it is written.
03SaveSave the steps you took as a job. It remembers the sequence, not the file.
04ReuseNext week, open the new file and run the job. The same work, without doing it again.

For example

Four problems every hand-made export has.

Trailing spaces you cannot see, a blank row, the same order twice, and a column named for a database rather than a person. Here is that file, and the same file after a job runs.

Before

order_id	cust_name·	amount
10431	··Northgate Supply·	4820.00
10432	Bell & Rowe	3275.50
—	—	—
10432	Bell & Rowe	3275.50

Saved job4 steps · runs in order

1Change valuesTrim spaces — every column
2Remove empty rowsAll columns blank
3Remove duplicatesWhole row must match
4Rename columncust_name → Customer

Open next week's file, pick this job, and the same four steps run again.

After

Order ID	Customer	Amount
10431	Northgate Supply	4820.00
10432	Bell & Rowe	3275.50

· marks a space you would not otherwise see. The red row is blank in every column. Nothing here is edited by hand — it is the four steps below, run in order.

The value

Stop repeating the same work.

If you clean, compare or transform the same kind of spreadsheet every week, you should not have to build the process again from scratch each time.

Save timeDo the setup once. Run the same steps on the next file instead of starting over.
Reduce manual errorsA saved job runs the same steps in the same order, which reduces the small mistakes that creep into repetitive manual work.
Get productive work doneSpend less time preparing data and more time using it.

Example

10 min × 20 files a month=3h 20m

That is three hours and twenty minutes of repetitive work in a month — in this example, not a figure measured in Rote. Save the steps as a job and the next file is a matter of running it.

Do it once. Reuse it on every file after that.

What it does

Four jobs, all working today.

Everything here exists in the current build. What is planned but not built is listed separately and clearly.

Reusable jobsSave the steps you took and run them on next month's file. Rote checks the columns still match before it does anything, and stops rather than guessing if they do not.Clean tabular dataClean CSV files: trim stray spaces, remove blank rows and duplicates, rename and reorder columns, sort on several fields — and see every change before anything is written.Merge datasetsCombine two to four CSV files into one. Map columns that are named differently in each file, and decide what happens to the columns only some files have.Compare datasetsCompare two to four CSV files on the columns that identify a record, and get four groups: identical, different, only in the first file, only in the second.

Local-first

Your files never leave your computer.

Rote is a desktop application. It opens files from your disk, works on them there, and writes results where you tell it to. There is no account, no upload and no cloud processing.

Nothing is uploadedNo server sees your data, because no server is involved. That is a property of how Rote is built, not a policy it promises.
Nothing is overwrittenRote never silently changes or replaces a source file. You see the result first, and output goes to a file you choose.
No AI requiredThe same input gives the same output, every time. Rote does the operations you chose, in the order you chose them.
Built for people, not programmersNo formulas, no scripting and no command line needed. If you can use a spreadsheet, you can use Rote.

Be first to use Rote.

Rote is in development. Join the wishlist and we'll let you know when the beta is ready. If there is something you need it to do, ask.

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