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A love letter to the CSV format

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Re: A love letter to the CSV format

#2

Post by Qem » 

  9. Excel hates CSV
  It clearly means CSV must be doing something right.
This is one area where LibreOffice Calc shines in comparison to Excel. Importing CSVs is much more convenient.

Re: A love letter to the CSV format

#3

Post by trzeci »

Qem wrote: post #2

9. Excel hates CSV It clearly means CSV must be doing something right. This is one area where LibreOffice Calc shines in comparison to Excel. Importing CSVs is much more convenient.

I don't get it - why the world, Excel can't just open the CSV, assume from the extension it's COMMA separated value and do the rest. It does work slightly better when importing, just a little.

Re: A love letter to the CSV format

#4

Post by Der_Einzige »

I'm in on the "shit on microsoft for hard to use formats train" but as someone who did a LOT of .docx parsing - it turned into zen when I realized that I can just convert my docs into the easily parsed .html5 using something like pandoc.

This is a good blog post and Xan is a really neat terminal tool.

Re: A love letter to the CSV format

#5

Post by TuringTest »

trzeci wrote: post #3
Qem wrote: post #2

9. Excel hates CSV It clearly means CSV must be doing something right. This is one area where LibreOffice Calc shines in comparison to Excel. Importing CSVs is much more convenient.

I don't get it - why the world, Excel can't just open the CSV, assume from the extension it's COMMA separated value and do the rest. It does work slightly better when importing, just a little.

It could, but it doesn't want to. The whole MS Office dominance came into being by making sure other tools can't properly open documents created by MS tools; plus being able to open standard formats but creating small incompatibilities all around, so that you share the document in MS format instead.

Re: A love letter to the CSV format

#6

Post by Qem »

trzeci wrote: post #3
Qem wrote: post #2

9. Excel hates CSV It clearly means CSV must be doing something right. This is one area where LibreOffice Calc shines in comparison to Excel. Importing CSVs is much more convenient.

I don't get it - why the world, Excel can't just open the CSV, assume from the extension it's COMMA separated value and do the rest. It does work slightly better when importing, just a little.

Probably Microsoft treats a pure-text, simply specified, human-readable and editable spreadsheet format that fosters interoperability with competing software as an existential threat.

Re: A love letter to the CSV format

#7

Post by tengwar2 »

I'm not really sure why "Excel hates CSV". I import into Excel all the time. I'm sure the functionality could be expanded, but it seems to work fine. The bit of the process I would like improved is nothing to do with CSV - it's that the exporting programs sometimes rearrange the order of fields, and you have to accommodate that in Excel after the import. But since you can have named columns in Excel (make the data in to a table), it's not a big deal.

Re: A love letter to the CSV format

#8

Post by gibibit »

Qem wrote: post #2

9. Excel hates CSV It clearly means CSV must be doing something right. This is one area where LibreOffice Calc shines in comparison to Excel. Importing CSVs is much more convenient.

Excel won't import ISO 8601 timestamps either, which is crazy these days where it's the universal standard, and there's no excuse to use anything else.

You have to replace the "T" separator with a space and also any trailing "Z" UTC suffix (and I think any other timezone/offset as well?) for Excel to be able to parse as a time/date.

Re: A love letter to the CSV format

#9

Post by Night_Thastus »

Qem wrote: post #2

9. Excel hates CSV It clearly means CSV must be doing something right. This is one area where LibreOffice Calc shines in comparison to Excel. Importing CSVs is much more convenient.

I just wish Excel was a little less bad about copy-pasting CSVs as well. Every single time, without fail, it dumps them into a single column. Every single time I use "text to columns" it has insane defaults where it's fixed-width instead of delimited by, you know, commas. So I change that and finally it's fixed.

Then I go do it somewhere else and have to set it up all over again. Drives me nuts. How the default behavior isn't to just put them in the way you'd expect is mind-boggling.

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