[capeterson]

LibreOffice is generally a little less aggressive about formatting, but still has issues similar to Excel.

For me personally, I usually view things in Excel/LO but don't save, and if I need to modify anything I'll use a text editor for one-off changes, or I'll use something like Python with the pandas library for more programmatic changes. Pandas does have issues forcing timestamps to convert sometimes, but that can be easily configured. Otherwise, no problems with this method.

There's definitely a lot of friction if you want to edit .CSV's without your formatting/encoding being altered, unfortunately.

[munk-a]

I much prefer ingesting CSVs into LibreOffice since it's a lot more upfront about what encoding it's going to try and use and the delimiter it has chosen - and those choices are extremely easy to modify and flexible. Excel also has a habit of utterly clobbering character encoding on export - once you start seeing umlauts and cedillas in your text you'll notice that Excel has a really bad habit of chosen latin-1.

[capeterson]

Yeah I suppose that's the crux of it. I really like that first popup that LibreOffice has when you open it up where you can specify encoding, delimiters, etc.

LibreOffice does a similar amount of clobbering, but in general it notifies you of any would-be clobbering and allows you to abort beforehand, which is really nice. I still avoid exporting via LibreOffice though for very sensitive situations, but it is noticeably better still.