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Unfortunately that is only the case as long as you stay within the US. for non-US users Excel has pretty annoying defaults, such as defaulting to ; instead of ,
by dtech 3y ago
Unfortunately that is only the case as long as you stay within the US. for non-US users Excel has pretty annoying defaults, such as defaulting to ; instead of , as a separator for "CSV", or trouble because other languages and Excel instances use , instead of . for decimal separators.
A nice alternative I've used often is to constructor an excel table and then giving is an .xls extension, which Excel happily accepts and has requires much less user explanation than telling individual users how to get Excel to correctly parse a CSV.
- rrr_oh_man 3y ago> Unfortunately, that is only the case as long as you stay outside the US. For US users Excel has pretty annoying defaults, such as defaulting to , instead of ; as a separator for "CSV", or trouble because US instances of Excel use . instead of , for decimal separators.
- rietta 3y agoLocalization is a thing. None of this is a show stopper. Subclasses and configuration screen for import and export.
- Macha 3y agoAnd then you get a business analyst at your client going "I just hit export in our internal tool, what's this delimiter that you're asking me about in the upload form? Google Sheets doesn't ask me to tell them that"
- prepend 3y agoAnd how do you fix the “some analyst” problem? Is there a better format that reduces this problem?
- SAI_Peregrinus 3y agoJSON? RON? Protobuf? Cap'n'Proto? Anything with more types than "string" which is all CSV has, and with an unambiguous data encoding. Preferably also a way to transmit the schema, since all of these formats (including CSV) have a schema but don't necessarily include it in the output. About half the problems with CSV are due to encoding ambiguities, the other half are due to schema mismatches.