[Symbiote]

This is a fairly new feature in Excel.

The lack of this feature pushed a lot of scientists to OpenOffice/LibreOffice Calc. At first, just to open the file and "Save as Excel", but of course, then they start using Calc.

(At least that's my experience writing scientific software in Europe. Excel localized not just display, but the input and output. With Calc you could just open a file as "pipe separated UTF-8" and be done with it.)

[buckminster]

If you rename your .csv as .txt then you get a wizard where you can choose delimiters, etc. This works in Excel 2000. I don't have an older version to hand.