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> Good Excel output libraries have been around for at least 20 years I wish that were the case more often. Depends on your ecosystem, of course. For instance,

> Good Excel output libraries have been around for at least 20 years I wish that were the case more often. Depends on your ecosystem, of course. For instance, I've yet to find a good XLSX library for JS that works well "idempotently" (in the browser as well as Node/etc). Every one I tried either had native dependencies and couldn't run in-browser or had a cost (time, money, size) I couldn't budget for at the time. I have found some XLS libraries for JS that were extremely "mid", but outputting XLS is nearly as bad as CSV in 2024. (Including all the huge messy legacy of character set Encoding problems.) The best and worst thing about CSV is that it seems "low overhead": it seems really cheap to output. ("How hard can it be, just ','.join(records)?" has been the pit so many of us fall into over and over again and sometimes never come out.) In terms of low overhead: in a world where all my APIs are already talking JSON if I can wrap an existing HTTP API with just two extra headers to get "free" Excel files for my users, that could be a beautiful world: Content-Type: application/json+excel Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="BusinessUsersDumbReportRequest.xljson" All the pieces are already there. If you could teach every user to use "Data > From JSON" we could maybe have nice things today instead of yet another CSV export dump. We just need someone on the Excel team to greenlight a "double to click to open an .XLJSON file" feature.

PaulHoule 3y ago
Why not just add a file association for plain .json files?
- WorldMaker 3y ago
  First and foremost to avoid accidents: We don't want a misconfigured HTTP website accidentally opening a new Excel window for every fetch/XHR call or to have to fight Excel defaults to get JSON to open up in our IDE or Dev Tools of choice. We don't want random shell scripts accidentally curl-ing things to Excel. Things like that. Secondly for "ownership" reasons: We don't want to give non-developers the mistaken impression that Excel "owns" JSON and that it is a Microsoft format. I've had people tell me that CSV must be a Microsoft format because you can double click them in Excel and they show an Excel-like icon (in some ways it has been too long since Lotus existed and Excel was in the "we'll take all of our competitors' file associations too" era). On the one hand it might be nice to blame all of CSV's problems on Microsoft and Excel if that were actually the case, but on the other hand it also confuses people as to the real/valid uses of the format. Unfortunately, too, that transitive relationship goes both ways and I've heard second hand that CSV files are among the reasons the Excel team hopes to never add another file type association again because supposedly they get far too many support requests for CSV file problems that maybe shouldn't be their job to deal with. A separate file association adds some intent of "this file was actually meant to be opened in Excel and hopefully the developer actually tested it some".

PaulHoule 3y ago

Why not just add a file association for plain .json files?

WorldMaker 3y ago
First and foremost to avoid accidents: We don't want a misconfigured HTTP website accidentally opening a new Excel window for every fetch/XHR call or to have to fight Excel defaults to get JSON to open up in our IDE or Dev Tools of choice. We don't want random shell scripts accidentally curl-ing things to Excel. Things like that. Secondly for "ownership" reasons: We don't want to give non-developers the mistaken impression that Excel "owns" JSON and that it is a Microsoft format. I've had people tell me that CSV must be a Microsoft format because you can double click them in Excel and they show an Excel-like icon (in some ways it has been too long since Lotus existed and Excel was in the "we'll take all of our competitors' file associations too" era). On the one hand it might be nice to blame all of CSV's problems on Microsoft and Excel if that were actually the case, but on the other hand it also confuses people as to the real/valid uses of the format. Unfortunately, too, that transitive relationship goes both ways and I've heard second hand that CSV files are among the reasons the Excel team hopes to never add another file type association again because supposedly they get far too many support requests for CSV file problems that maybe shouldn't be their job to deal with. A separate file association adds some intent of "this file was actually meant to be opened in Excel and hopefully the developer actually tested it some".