5 ms·

Excel is the ultimate bane of CSV files. If Microsoft would fix Excel and distribute the fixes to old Excels, then life would be good again.

• chrismorgan 5y ago
  But they will never do that because that would break existing systems that depend on the old behaviour.
  • wolrah 5y ago
    > But they will never do that because that would break existing systems that depend on the old behaviour. Which is an inevitability for anything that's been a dependency for long enough. Either you admit that things have to change and sometimes shit that's been secretly broken for years will have to change too, or you give in to the shit and admit that you can never solve any problems that made it to production. Both answers suck, but one is a lot more suck so I choose the "fix it anyways and if something else turns out to have depended on the brokeness then add that to the list of shit to fix" approach whenever possible.
• aliasEli 5y ago
  It is not just Excel, there are a lot of systems that export CSV. Many of them are broken. Examples: - double quotes in text fields - using the wrong decimal separator, should it be "," or "." - using the wrong column separator, should be "," or ";"
• WorldMaker 5y ago
  The "General" data column behavior thing that caused the incorrect parsing of gene names as Dates goes all the way back to the original Visicalc. Are you suggesting Microsoft should patch Visicalc and Lotus 1-2-3 as well?