[beefield]

Well, my personal rule is to never touch csv with excel, because depending on the locales, most of the time excel breaks something in the file. (Of course, in theory I might make a flawless data type mapping when importing the file to excel, but unfortunately that happening is quite rare...)

[johannes1234321]

This is a concern and there are lots of issues (also think about proper escaping etc.) but Excel is ubiquitous outside hackernews's demography.