While working on a scientific computing/data science project, it's likely that you'll need to interact with datasets that have been saved in CSV files. In the context of examining the data within a CSV file, a simple text editor can only display that data in text format, which isn't very readable. On the other hand, software that can show the content of CSV files in a nicely formatted table (such as Microsoft Excel) can be quite troublesome to work with in addition to the current IDE or text editor that's being used for code development.

As the premier IDE for Python, one of the most popular programming languages for scientific computing and data science, PyCharm looks to address that problem by offering its own table viewer via the CSV plugin. This plugin allows us to inspect CSV files in formatted tables within PyCharm's editor.

First, we need to install the plugin since it doesn't come with PyCharm by default. Similar to the process of installing the Markdown plugin in the previous section of this chapter, you can go to the Plugins section in Settings to have the CSV plugin installed in your version of PyCharm.