For well over a decade, our team here at Fathom has confronted these questions time and time again as we've worked to unpack complex—often large and unwieldy—datasets.

Rowboat is a new tool for making sense of tabular data—the kind found in Excel spreadsheets and CSV files—that draws from what we've learned from years of building custom platforms for understanding data.

Automatically map latitude and longitude coordinates, then use time data in another column to play back the ship’s precise movements.

Rowboat takes a core part of the process we experience in all our projects—that initial moment of seeing inside a dataset—and encapsulates it in one tool that anyone can use without having to learn complex software or write custom code.

As more people deal with data in their everyday work, they often wind up using the wrong tools by force of habit—tools that are widely available but not built around understanding data. We’ve focused on making a tool that runs ridiculously fast and uses visualization as a means of understanding—not just as a final product. We’ve consistently found that this method changes how people approach their work. Being able to ask questions quickly leaves more room for playing with the data, which leads to more useful insights that might be otherwise missed when each query is a chore.

A visual look into 40 seasons of contestants on Survivor.

At its core, Rowboat is built around three ideas: understanding, interaction, and immediacy:

Understanding

The point is not collecting, managing, cleaning, or even editing data—it’s about understanding what it means. And the fastest way to understand data is to visualize it, answering questions before you have a chance to ask, and inspiring new questions and insights.

Interaction

The faster you can filter, search, explore, and navigate, the more quickly you’ll be able to make your information usable. High speed, low-latency interactions mean you can ask more questions in less time, making it possible to quickly ask “what about…” rather than spending time constructing complex queries and waiting for responses from the cloud.

Immediacy

Rowboat eliminates the need to install complex software or set up a “workspace” before you’re able to look at a single data point. Just drop a file into the browser window and instantly see what the data has to say. Everything stays private in your web browser, until you decide it’s time to upload and share.

We also wanted a data tool that you actually enjoy using, and that you’d reach for first when you start working with a dataset. We have so many plans for where we go from here, and all the ways we can connect it to other parts of your process, but we’re releasing it now to kick off a conversation about where we go next. While most of the features are free, we’ve also included a paid option that supports features for exporting charts and sharing data, whether as elegant PDFs or online links to your data running inside Rowboat.

The Fathom team celebrates a successful launch on the patio.

Rowboat has been a long time in the making and we are forever grateful to the people who made this possible—from all our team members past and present, to our friends, collaborators, and beta testers whose insights and feedback have driven us forward.

We hope you’ll find it useful enough to sign up, whether to make use of these extra features or to support our ongoing development.

To learn more about Rowboat, explore one of our demo files, or start viewing your own data in Rowboat, visit us at rowboat.xyz.