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Excel, while amazing on its own, is horrible for exchanging data in so many ways. I've maintained a policy at my company (life sciences) not to accept Excel fi
by sk5t 6y ago
Excel, while amazing on its own, is horrible for exchanging data in so many ways. I've maintained a policy at my company (life sciences) not to accept Excel files in any automated process; while parsing csv/tsv is a pain, xlsx/xlsb/etc. would amplify that pain in so many ways both predictable and surprising.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/08/26/an-alarming-number-of-scientific-papers-contain-excel-errors/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/08/26/an-al...
- arethuza 6y agoParsing proper Excel files is fine - you just have to use a proper Excel parser such as EPPlus or Aspose.Cells or similar. In lots of ways this is actually easier than handling CSV files from random sources.
- sk5t 6y agoI've done it with Apache POI, and while that 'worked' it doesn't wash away the fundamental problems with Excel datatype guessing. CSV is not great either (no fun explaining encoding or invisible control characters and unusual whitespace to the average IT person) but it is nevertheless less bad.