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I've been amazed by how much better LibreOffice is at importing CSVs in a sane manner than Excel. Its CSV import prompt is nothing short of the gold standard an
by Pikamander2 3y ago
I've been amazed by how much better LibreOffice is at importing CSVs in a sane manner than Excel. Its CSV import prompt is nothing short of the gold standard and puts Excel to shame.
Also, even if the CSV format is completely valid, Excel will still find a way to misinterpret some of your cells in baffling ways, destroying the original data in the process if you don't notice it in time.
- prox 3y agoHeck yes, LibreOffice shines when it comes to that. Excel always threw me curveballs a lot.
- wiz21c 3y agoYeah, I can complain about LO in many ways, but the way it opens CSV is much better than Excel. It was developed by a dev, that's for sure.
- nuc1e0n 3y agoThe root cause of a lot of problems is that Excel's CSV import is garbage. Someone should write a simple utility modelled on LibreOffice's CSV import dialog that reads in a CSV file and outputs its content as an XLSX file with all the cells formatted as text. Being as how XLSX files are just XML text in a renamed ZIP file and CSV is a very simple format such a project could be written over a weekend. Network admins could then create a group policy to reassign the CSV file extension to open with the utility instead of Excel. I guess the utility could automatically open the generated XLSX in Excel as well. This would fix so many data corruption issues across the whole world. Microsoft themselves could even do this as a powertoy.
- smcin 3y agoYes the LibreOffice CSV import dialog showing you a what-if preview of what you'd get as you play with different settings, is pure amazing.