Here is a thread where @Johnny_L.A explains what he is trying to do. It is literally just taking a text file that is either fixed length or comma separated fields, doing some text manipulations to standardize the formatting and spelling of commonly used terms, sorting and doing a comparison for unique records, and then dumping it out into a predefined text format. Unless I’m missing something there are no data analytics (which is what Tableau does), no complicated processing or external lookups, no complex database management, or anything else that would require more than straightforward text manipulation and basic file I/O.
A clever Unix hacker could probably do all of this with regex and pipes but for a simpleton like me this is an obvious use case for Python (or Perl, although at this point you’d probably have difficultly even finding someone who would sheepishly admit to having used Perl back in the far off days of the ‘Nineties). There is no need for a complex package with a continuing subscription fee to do a basic task that you could pay a community college student beer money to code up for you, or possible even just have some AI tool gin up a serviceable script (although prompting it to do exactly what you need of it is probably more effort than just writing the code yourself) and the run it on an open source Python interpreter you can download from Python.org.
Stranger