Meaningfully
A semantic search tool for text columns in spreadsheets, letting journalists, researchers and anyone working with survey responses or similar data search a CSV by meaning instead of exact keywords.
Meaningfully takes a CSV with a text column and lets a user search it by describing what they are looking for in a full phrase or sentence, rather than matching keywords; the closest matching rows are returned by similarity rather than exact text, and results can also be filtered by other metadata columns. The author positions it between keyword search, which misses paraphrasing, typos and foreign-language text, and an AI chatbot, which can fabricate answers, describing it as well suited to semi-structured data such as consumer complaints, credit-card transactions, government-contract descriptions or survey responses.
Embedding the spreadsheet's text locally is slow but free; the author recommends supplying an OpenAI API key instead, at a cost typically of a few cents even for spreadsheets with tens of thousands of rows. The tool is in alpha and is not yet suited to spreadsheets larger than about 100,000 rows.
It is written in TypeScript and released under the MIT license.