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This is a great defense, but I feel like it misses the single biggest reason CSV will never die: your boss can open it. We can talk about streaming and Parquet
by untrimmed 1y ago
This is a great defense, but I feel like it misses the single biggest reason CSV will never die: your boss can open it. We can talk about streaming and Parquet all day, but if the marketing team can't double-click the file, it's useless.
- imtringued 1y agoWith what software? LibreOffice? Excel doesn't support opening CSV files with a double click. It lets you import CSV files into a spreadsheet, but that requires reading unreasonably complicated instructions.
- jowea 1y agoHow is that not opening?
- imtringued 1y agoYou are creating a new spreadsheet that you can save as an xlsx. What you are looking at is not the CSV file itself.
- NoboruWataya 1y agoThis is a distinction that does not matter to most non-technical people.
- tokai 1y agoYou are missing the point so hard its hilarious.
- john_the_writer 1y agoWell I mean unless you're inspecting it with a hex editor, you're not looking at the csv file itself. Even then, I suppose you could say that's not even the file itself. An electron microscope perhaps? But then you've got the whole Heisenberg issue, so there's that.
- eviks 1y agoThat's not true either, try it yourself with a simple csv file, open it, add a row and save - you'll see the original update (there are some limitations)
- john_the_writer 1y agoWhat are you talking about? Excel opens csv with zero issue. In windows, and mac. Mac you right click and "open with". Or you open excel, and click file/open and find the csv. I do the first one a dozen times a day.
- 1wd 1y agoOnly if the Windows Regional Settings List Separators happens to be "comma", which is not the case in most of Europe (even in regions that use the decimal point) so only CSV files with SEP=, as the first line work reliably with Excel.
- john_the_writer 1y agoLiterally did this all day today. Took a csv file, parsed it in elixir, processed it and created a new csv file, then opened that in excel, to confirm the changes. At least 100 times today.
- curioussquirrel 1y agoThis, plus the parser in Excel gets thrown off by some multiline edge cases very easily. Also, the file has to be UTF-8-BOM, not just UTF-8.
- efitz 1y agoExcel absolutely can open csv files with a double click if you associate the file type extension.
- boshomi 1y agoYou should never blindly trust Excel when using CSV files. Try this csv file: COL1,COL2,COL3 5,"+A2&C1","+A2*8&B1"
- IAmBroom 1y agoTrue, but not the point here. "You can" and "You should as a general rule" are not the same.
- 0x3444ac53 1y agoHesitant to actually try to open this, what does it do?
- ertgbnm 1y agoOn windows, csv's automatically open in Excel through the file explorer. Almost all normal businesses use windows so the OPs claim is pretty reasonable.
- delta_p_delta_x 1y ago> Excel doesn't support opening CSV files with a double click Yes, it does. When Excel is installed, it installs a file type association for CSV and Explorer sets Excel as the default handler.
- kelvinjps10 1y agoThose programs support opening csv with double click