I don't think it's necessarily that CSV is good enough but that its the only ASCII tabular format that "double clicks into Excel" by default. Excel supports a

I don't think it's necessarily that CSV is good enough but that its the only ASCII tabular format that "double clicks into Excel" by default. Excel supports a lot more tabular formats these days, but you have to search the ribbon for their importers. It's JSON support is actually surprisingly good, for instance. Sometimes I think the best thing that the Excel team could do to make the state of the world of tabular formats for us better as developers is just to add a bunch of new file extensions that you can rename files to. For instance, if you could just rename a JSON file to end with something like .XLJSON and a Business Analyst or Accountant can just double click to open in Excel, that would open up a lot more nicer tabular format options beyond CSV with better developer ergonomics.