4 ms·
> Excel is a good tool for working with CSVs > Excel is an OK tool for working with CSVs > Excel can losslessly save CSVs it opens Seriously. It's amazing how
by justinsaccount 10y ago
> Excel is a good tool for working with CSVs
> Excel is an OK tool for working with CSVs
> Excel can losslessly save CSVs it opens
Seriously. It's amazing how fast excel can corrupt a simple csv file.
- bdcravens 10y agoI've had odd bugs show up in a CSV import process, where it was a numeric string (think account numbers) that had leading zeros. Turned out the imported CSV had been cleaned by moving records around in Excel and saving as CSV (which of course saw the account numbers as numerics and conveniently truncated the zeros)
- VLM 10y agoExcel thinks anything vaguely scientific notation-ish is a float, which is a nightmare if you have, for example, four hexadecimal digits 2E15 which is 11797 in decimal but excel will helpfuly "fix" it to 2 million billion (depending on your locale of billion LOL) That was a contrived example but I've seen Excel get very confused by foreign postal codes involving digits surrounding a letter "E" or apartment number columns for example "1E"
- tomlock 10y agoExcel enthusiastically and automatically types oh-so-many things. It'll take dates and assume they are in american MM/DD/YYYY in some fields and then treat dates in the same column like 13/01/1986 as strings. That exact problem I had when working with a company who had a stocked item with the code "060E2". When people don't know scientific notation the result is bewildering!!!
- LoSboccacc 10y agoexcel doesn't use comma by default as separator on comma separated value files, enouh said.
- tinus_hn 10y agoEven more surprisingly, this is locale dependent. So the US developer never sees this problem, but the European user does.
- ashmud 10y agoEmployee IDs. That is [not even close to] all. Sadly.