First, you're wrong again, you can also save as tab delimited text or just text. Also, Access has some more Excel export options. http://superuser.com/a/107124

First, you're wrong again, you can also save as tab delimited text or just text. Also, Access has some more Excel export options. http://superuser.com/a/107124 http://superuser.com/a/107124 Secondly, Excel is not designed for round trip editing in plain text formats. You shouldn't use Word as a text editor either :-) There are specialized editors if you want to directly edit a csv file etc. I use them sometimes. That's not what Excel is for.