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Does any widely used application do it better. I always view CSV as a lowest common denominator, of course more precise formats exist, but not everyone can use
by 41209 5y ago
Does any widely used application do it better.
I always view CSV as a lowest common denominator, of course more precise formats exist, but not everyone can use those. Csvs normally get the job done, but like anything else you need to know it's limitations. Something like a basic phone book should work, your scientific data, with dozens upon dozens of floating point numbers may not work.
- capeterson 5y agoLibreOffice is generally a little less aggressive about formatting, but still has issues similar to Excel. For me personally, I usually view things in Excel/LO but don't save, and if I need to modify anything I'll use a text editor for one-off changes, or I'll use something like Python with the pandas library for more programmatic changes. Pandas does have issues forcing timestamps to convert sometimes, but that can be easily configured. Otherwise, no problems with this method. There's definitely a lot of friction if you want to edit .CSV's without your formatting/encoding being altered, unfortunately.
- munk-a 5y agoI much prefer ingesting CSVs into LibreOffice since it's a lot more upfront about what encoding it's going to try and use and the delimiter it has chosen - and those choices are extremely easy to modify and flexible. Excel also has a habit of utterly clobbering character encoding on export - once you start seeing umlauts and cedillas in your text you'll notice that Excel has a really bad habit of chosen latin-1.
- capeterson 5y agoYeah I suppose that's the crux of it. I really like that first popup that LibreOffice has when you open it up where you can specify encoding, delimiters, etc. LibreOffice does a similar amount of clobbering, but in general it notifies you of any would-be clobbering and allows you to abort beforehand, which is really nice. I still avoid exporting via LibreOffice though for very sensitive situations, but it is noticeably better still.
- IanCal 5y agoThese are not limitations of CSV files, that's excel. Not being able to open a csv file starting with the letter I has nothing to do with CSV as a format. There just aren't that many widely used applications that deal with things like this, but Google sheets seems to be the obvious one.
- pbreit 5y agoGoogle Sheets handles CSVs MUCH better.