[Tagbert]

Excel's default insistence on trying to coerce the data into what it expects the data to be is the source of many of the problems of people using CSV. Excel will even ignore quotes around values if it thinks that the value inside might be a number. I often work with CSV files that contain 17 digit IDs that use numeric characters "01233998742021925" which Excel will convert lossily into scientific notation rather than leaving it as a string. There are ways to override that but they are tedious and people don't do it by default.

I'd be satisfied if Excel was just a little less aggressive about it's data coercion on import.

[hermitcrab]

Excel trying to be helpful and silently converting data is a source of endless pain. In fact it is so bad, that geneticists have renamed some genes: https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-renam...