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by SebastianKra 682 days ago
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.

1 comments

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.