I'm convinced that 90% of the people who rail against CSV for "not being a real format" are the ones that got burned by Excel. It has always shocked me how terrible Excel is at handling CSV given the sheer number of people who have this use case.
The crazy part is that it wouldn't be all that hard to handle it properly. Excel could examine each column and apply a uniform transform on each column instead of applying transforms on a cell by cell basis. They could even put in real effort and let the user choose the format for each column as part of the import process. You know, like being able to specify "text" for columns like SSNs or Credit cards that you aren't going to do math on anyway.
The crazy part is that it wouldn't be all that hard to handle it properly. Excel could examine each column and apply a uniform transform on each column instead of applying transforms on a cell by cell basis. They could even put in real effort and let the user choose the format for each column as part of the import process. You know, like being able to specify "text" for columns like SSNs or Credit cards that you aren't going to do math on anyway.