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CSV can be manually read/edited by non-technical/non-developer humans using commonly available tools like Excel and Notepad. Not many of the better data formats
by HideousKojima 3y ago
CSV can be manually read/edited by non-technical/non-developer humans using commonly available tools like Excel and Notepad. Not many of the better data formats match that criteria.
- otherme123 3y agoNotepad, I agree. Excel... not so much: it tends to change data silently unless you are very cautious with your environment (e.g. dates transformed to number of days since 1900, and some strings to dates)
- HideousKojima 3y agoActually Excel finally added a "stop &$*@ing up my data" option recently: https://mashable.com/article/microsoft-excel-disable-setting-auto-conversion-data-into-dates https://mashable.com/article/microsoft-excel-disable-setting...
- otherme123 3y agoThat helps, no doubt. But last week one of my coworkers touched a Csv with Excel, and all dates went from ISO8601 to MDY. We are based in Europe (i.e. we use DMY at minimum). In my experience, a Csv touched by Excel is not trustable for further analysis.