Yeah, I can’t think of a reason why I’d really want to hand edit a CSV file. I think the rationale behind using CSV is even more basic. The reason why CSV is s

Yeah, I can’t think of a reason why I’d really want to hand edit a CSV file. I think the rationale behind using CSV is even more basic. The reason why CSV is so popular (and TSV, HTML and JSON for that matter), is that it is a human readable format. It is much easier to troubleshoot and debug data and data flows if you can open a file and see it in an editor. Especially when trying to move data between systems/people/groups. You don’t really need to edit the file, just read and mentally parse it if there is a problem. This is why the most popular formats are text based. It’s only when the verbosity of text is too great that we move to binary, such as for images and media (xpm excepted). For most other data, compression tends to be “good enough”.