8 ms·

The formats you describe sound interesting, but in the big corporate/government world the barriers to adoption are high. For example, the software package Cogno

The formats you describe sound interesting, but in the big corporate/government world the barriers to adoption are high. For example, the software package Cognos which is owned by IBM and connects to database servers. To extract data from it, you have a choice of csv, Excel or pdf. The pdf is only used if you have done a perfect job creating a report in Cognos and don't need to edit/adjust it further in Excel. So really, only 2 output formats. I realize that this is a specific use case here, but I was on Cognos for years, and then when they started shifting over to Tableau, it wasn't any better.. csv, MS formats, proprietary formats, etc.

cbsmith 5y ago
Cognos is a BI tool, and the formats you are talking about are for rendering reports, not data. If you're picking data formats based on being able to load & edit them in to Excel, you're already doomed.
- tw04 5y ago
  The entire article is about replacing CSVs for exchanging data exported from Excel... so why wouldn't he be picking data formats based on being able to load and edit them in Excel? If you're trying to solve this problem in a way that EXCLUDES Excel, you're already doomed. The business world will laugh at you and continue on their merry CSV way. >The biggest and most thorny problem to solve is the people problem: how do you convince people to stop creating new CSVs when they’ve never done things any other way? Fortunately - for this problem, anyway - most of the world’s business data is born in one of a handful of programs that are owned by an increasingly small number of companies. If Microsoft and Salesforce were somehow convinced to move away from CSV support in Excel and Tableau, a large portion of business users would move to a successor format as a matter of course. Of course, it’s debatable whether that kind of a change is in the best interest of those companies, but I’m cautiously optimistic.
  - cbsmith 5y ago
    > The entire article is about replacing CSVs for exchanging data exported from Excel... No, it's not. It's about replacing CSVs for exchanging data. It mentions that CSVs often are the product of someone exporting data from a spreadsheet or doing a table dump, and how just doing that tends to create a ton of problems, but Excel is an example, not the subject matter of the article. > The business world will laugh at you and continue on their merry CSV way. The business world pays me a lot of money to teach them not to use CSVs.
    - masklinn 5y ago
      > The business world pays me a lot of money to teach them not to use CSVs. Could you teach them better and faster? I don't think they're getting it. You have my blessing to use violence.
      - cbsmith 5y ago
        > Could you teach them better and faster? I don't think they're getting it. You have my blessing to use violence. I'm trying man. I'm trying.
      - barbarbar 5y ago
        This is the right suggestion.
    - wombatpm 5y ago
      TSV solve a lot of the pain
      - cbsmith 5y ago
        ...or, you know, you could use the ASCII characters specifically defined for separating records and units. ;-)
        derefr 5y ago
        If only I could type them on my keyboard. (I think this is a big part of why CSV is the way it is — people want to be able to hand-edit it, or at least hand-produce small test datasets to test the systems on the other end.)

cbsmith 5y ago

Cognos is a BI tool, and the formats you are talking about are for rendering reports, not data. If you're picking data formats based on being able to load & edit them in to Excel, you're already doomed.

tw04 5y ago
The entire article is about replacing CSVs for exchanging data exported from Excel... so why wouldn't he be picking data formats based on being able to load and edit them in Excel? If you're trying to solve this problem in a way that EXCLUDES Excel, you're already doomed. The business world will laugh at you and continue on their merry CSV way. >The biggest and most thorny problem to solve is the people problem: how do you convince people to stop creating new CSVs when they’ve never done things any other way? Fortunately - for this problem, anyway - most of the world’s business data is born in one of a handful of programs that are owned by an increasingly small number of companies. If Microsoft and Salesforce were somehow convinced to move away from CSV support in Excel and Tableau, a large portion of business users would move to a successor format as a matter of course. Of course, it’s debatable whether that kind of a change is in the best interest of those companies, but I’m cautiously optimistic.
- cbsmith 5y ago
  > The entire article is about replacing CSVs for exchanging data exported from Excel... No, it's not. It's about replacing CSVs for exchanging data. It mentions that CSVs often are the product of someone exporting data from a spreadsheet or doing a table dump, and how just doing that tends to create a ton of problems, but Excel is an example, not the subject matter of the article. > The business world will laugh at you and continue on their merry CSV way. The business world pays me a lot of money to teach them not to use CSVs.
  - masklinn 5y ago
    > The business world pays me a lot of money to teach them not to use CSVs. Could you teach them better and faster? I don't think they're getting it. You have my blessing to use violence.
    - cbsmith 5y ago
      > Could you teach them better and faster? I don't think they're getting it. You have my blessing to use violence. I'm trying man. I'm trying.
    - barbarbar 5y ago
      This is the right suggestion.
  - wombatpm 5y ago
    TSV solve a lot of the pain
    - cbsmith 5y ago
      ...or, you know, you could use the ASCII characters specifically defined for separating records and units. ;-)
      - derefr 5y ago
        If only I could type them on my keyboard. (I think this is a big part of why CSV is the way it is — people want to be able to hand-edit it, or at least hand-produce small test datasets to test the systems on the other end.)