There are absurdly many corner cases either way. For my money the best representation for an Excel spreadsheet is xlsx. There are several perfectly capable op

There are absurdly many corner cases either way. For my money the best representation for an Excel spreadsheet is xlsx. There are several perfectly capable open source xlsx reading and writing libraries, not to mention Excel itself. (At this point, Excel is pretty much the only reason I can think of for wanting to install Windows.) Using xlsx rules out vim of course, and much as I'm a fan of vim I think it's plain foolishness to endorse it as a spreadsheet program. Vim is fine for ad-hoc viewing and quick-and-dirty edits, especially if the file is full of numbers and uncomplicated text, but it's really easy to break a csv that has fancy escaping in it.