We do a lot of CSV imports (inventory/data management for art galleries). This is for a few reasons, most of which boil down to "it's an easy format to share wi

We do a lot of CSV imports (inventory/data management for art galleries). This is for a few reasons, most of which boil down to "it's an easy format to share with clients": - Clients that don't already have their data in an inventory management system usually have Excel spreadsheets, so we can just export that to CSV, parse it, and stick it in the database. - If they really have nothing (some commercial galleries, especially ones that have been around for 30+ years still do everything on index cards), then you can give someone a spreadsheet template to do the data entry into, and script the import step. - Even if they do, when preparing data for import, it's easy for the clients to look through the data (and for us) to see potential errors/inconsistencies that need to be corrected during the course of importing. - Small industry (data management services for commercial art galleries is maybe 2-3 companies in Europe, 1-2 in the US, and that's about it), all writing proprietary software, no semblance of agreed formats/standards. When a client quits one company and moves to another, it's easy to dump their data to CSV and leave the company doing the import to sort it out on the other end. Trying to piece together random-looking values across 15+ CSV files to see what the last legacy system meant by some string is a pain, but it's something that the client will pay for in most cases.