[cylinder714]

This encapsulates my problem with CSVs:

- If I send someone a spreadsheet, they'll open it with a spreadsheet application; Excel, LibreOffice, whatever.

- If I send someone a CSV file, they'll want to open it with a text editor.

Ack, no! Open it with a spreadsheet app, or load it into SQLite, or, best of all, open it with VisiData or some kind of editor designed for tabular data.

https://www.visidata.org/

[hobs]

Actually no - spreadsheets classically choose their own way to interpret CSVs, that's the classic way to get your client to continue to send you support requests.

There's a reason so many tools export to xls instead of csv.

[cm2187]

And if you just double click on a csv file to open it in excel (rather than importing from excel), excel will happily corrupt your data. Trim leading zeros in IDs, round large integers, not spot the date column is in us vs european format, etc.

[uncharted9]

Excel will happily ignore if you use tabs as delimiter and show all the columns as a single column. Atleast LibreOffice tries to figure out and confirms the delimiter before opening CSV.