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Depending on whether your OS uses a , or a . for decimal numbers changes how excel will parse a CSV file. Americans use a . for decimal numbers, so it will pars
by withinboredom 1y ago
Depending on whether your OS uses a , or a . for decimal numbers changes how excel will parse a CSV file. Americans use a . for decimal numbers, so it will parse it as a CSV. Other countries use a , for decimal numbers, so it will parse it as a SSV (semi-colon separated) and everything will be in a single column.
To make matters worse, randomly, employees will have their OS using US or GB locales so that if you distribute a CSV, it will work for some employees, but not for others.
- herbst 1y agoI don't know any of these problems. I use a modern operating system and office suite that supports CSV not a specific subset and syntax of it.
- mattmanser 1y ago1.01 in US === 1,01 in EU 1.01, "hi", CSV has problems, "1.01" 1,01, "hi", Yes it really does, "1,01" See the problem now? Your operating system cannot solve this problem.
- johnisgood 1y agoNot all of EU though. I am European and I never used "," anywhere yet people understood.
- johnisgood 1y agoI don't understand the down-votes, but okay, have it your way, lmao. Someone really hates dots.
- rickdeckard 1y agoI guess the downvotes are because you also didn't understand the context. It's not about people, it's about the Windows locale setting and how MS Excel interprets a CSV-file when you doubleclick it
- johnisgood 1y agoYeah, I agree with that and I find it frustrating.
- account42 1y agoCSV already solved this problem with quotes. Maybe not the most convenient solution for some users but that's no excuse for the Excel behavior of making up a different format depending on the locale.
- mbreese 1y agoExcel really doesn't care what users think. I mean, in biology, we've already had to change the names of genes to accommodate Excel's auto-date conversion routines. So, why would it care to have globally consistent CSV formats?
- herbst 1y agoIs this 2025? Why would any software safe it invalid like that to begin with?
- rickdeckard 1y agoThe syntax that MS Office uses to read/write a CSV is defined by the Regional Settings of your PC. Open control-panel for regional settings, select "Advanced settings" button on the bottom control.exe intl.cpl If you don't know any of these problems, then all the people and systems you work with have a "." as decimal and "," as separator, and you are spared from the hell of MS Office being unable to overrule these OS-settings when treating a CSV
- herbst 1y agoHonestly as this always was an obvious issue I usually just used ; and never got a complain. Obviously both . And , are used way to often not only for numbers. I am surprised this is problem enough (in 2025) that people emotionally discuss it.
- rickdeckard 1y ago> Honestly as this always was an obvious issue I usually just used ; and never got a complain. Thing is, it is not about what you used, you are not able to control this from happening when your CSV should work for people in other countries. Whatever configuration you used which never got a complain, if your recipients also used Excel to work with those documents, they probably have the same regional setting on Windows for list/thousands/decimal separator. If you use ";" as separator, i.e. Excel in UK, US, Japan, China, Korea will not be able to correctly open your CSV. But even better: If you created this CSV on a France or Sweden regional setting, the thousands separator will be a whitespace ("1 000" instead "1,000" or "1.000"), so Excel in e.g. Italy will not detect those properly. > I am surprised this is problem enough (in 2025) that people emotionally discuss it. It is a (intentional) weakness of MS Office for those who work in an international environment, because Excel links itself to .csv files to hinder the experience, as it is neither able to properly detect them nor guide their users through a process to properly handle them.
- ozlikethewizard 1y agothis seems like less of an excel problem and more of an issue with an improperly escaped data set though?
- withinboredom 1y agoNo. Excel changes the SEPERATOR when parsing depending on the locale settings. This means a CSV generated or saved with a decimal of . will not be able to be opened by one with a , and vice-versa. This is an Excel issue, as it doesn’t even try to determine or ask which separator to use. Hence why the comment above said you need to use the import wizard and not double click.
- deanishe 1y agoExcel's behaviour is almost as annoying. It's basically impossible to produce a correctly-formatted German document on an English OS and vice-versa.