TaCo: Comparative Visualization of Large Tabular Data

Abstract

Tabular data plays a vital role in many different domains. In the course of a project, changes to the structure and content of tables can result in multiple instances of a table. A challenging task when working with such derived tables is to understand what exactly has changed from one version to another. Traditional comparison tools assist users in inspecting differences between multiple table instances, however, the resulting visualizations are often hard to interpret or do not scale to large tables with thousands of rows and columns. To address these challenges, we developed TaCo, an interactive comparison tool that effectively visualizes the differences between multiple tables at various levels of granularity: (1) the aggregated differences between all table instances, (2) the differences between one table compared to all others, and (3) the detailed differences between two instances.