[imtringued]

It's 2024 and people still haven't realized that Excel does not and never will support opening CSV files. The closest thing it allows you to do is import data from a CSV file into your current spreadsheet, but open a CSV file? It will never do that. Stop using CSV for excel, just generate .xlsx files like everyone else.

[prepend]

I can double click on a csv and it opens pretty cleanly in Excel. I don’t use it systematically but I usually eyeball csvs using Excel.

[SebastianKra]

Not in every version. I recently found out that Excel doesn't recognize commas as separators in a comma-separated-values file on my coworkers PCs.

I presume it's because Germany uses the comma as a decimal separator instead of a dot.

I eventually settled on just exporting Excel because I couldn't get both the encoding and separator to work at the same time.

Another fun story is that a coworker lost data, when they opened a csv, wrote data to a second sheet, and then saved it. A sane program would probably have brought up a save-as window. Excel didn't. It just discarded the second sheet.

[prepend]

I don’t like exporting excel because that’s harder to read. I don’t make the data for Excel. I make the data portable.

The fact that it opens in Excel is just convenient. If Excel doesn’t work, I’d use BBEdit or one of a billion other clients that read CSV.

Far fewer clients can open Excel files. Especially 10 or 100 years in the future.

[LorenPechtel]

If Excel is set to handle the extension .csv then attempting to open a .csv file correctly launches Excel and imports it. File for read only, but if you want it back out you have force matters, it's not automatic.