5 ms·

Please Offer an Excel Export Option

57 points by smcgivern 12y ago

FabianBeiner 12y ago
For PHP, I can recommend https://github.com/PHPOffice/PHPExcel https://github.com/PHPOffice/PHPExcel.
justincormack 12y ago
xlslib, at a brief glance, looks like it is based on the .xsl format, not .xlsx. Wondering if it is easier to generate .xlsx XML files for export, or not.
- skeletonjelly 12y ago
  They're totally different formats. It'd have to be a separate implementation. xls is binary, xlsx is XML based.
  - troels 12y ago
    xls is not just one format. There are several formats which Excel will understand, that uses that extension. One of them is a real simple xml-based format (SpreadsheetML), that is way easier to generate than proper excel files and has most of the features you need (At least for data transport purpose). Highly recommend using it.
    - Mikhail_Edoshin 12y ago
      I second SpreadsheetML; it's plain XML (not multi-part compressed .xslx) and it supports multiple sheets, formulas, formatting, and some other bits like named ranges, print settings, and such.
      - justincormack 12y ago
        Ok,so is there a simple implementation guide/library?
        Mikhail_Edoshin 12y ago
        Yes, here it is: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa140066%28office.10%29.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa140066%28office.10... It only describes the data part and doesn't document Excel options such as print settings and filters; if you need them, create a sample in Excel, save it as XML Spreadsheet 2003 and examine the result. (The 'big' Excel format that is a part of Office Open XML format is also called Spreadsheet ML, but they're different; from what I understand this one is a subset.)
        the_why_of_y 12y ago
        It's a deprecated format that was essentially Microsoft's first experiment at an XML based format in the Office XP/Office 2003 days... whether it will continue to be supported in future versions is anybody's guess, given that the successor format OOXML is much more widely adopted.
        Mikhail_Edoshin 12y ago
        My impression is that Microsoft is fairly reliable when it comes to supporting old formats and standards. E.g. I can still send Word and Excel DDE commands and this is a tech from 90s, Windows 3.1 and stuff. OOXML is certainly more powerful, but it's also more complex.
        troels 12y ago
        Here's a really basic implementation that I used in some code as a drop-in replacement for csv: https://gist.github.com/troelskn/cf9df474662c88ba7951 https://gist.github.com/troelskn/cf9df474662c88ba7951
  - justincormack 12y ago
    I know that they are totally different, wondering if xlsx is simpler so that it would be easier code, or whether it is just as complex really, and not suer what real world compatibility is.
- tealeg 12y ago
  Nearly 4 years ago I wrote a library in Go to read XLSX - that was trivial. It's grown over time, and this year it started growing feature that allow it to write XLSX format. This is a whole different ball game - Microsoft Excel is really picky about what it will and won't accept. In most cases Excel will simply moan and do an automated repair on files that don't match exactly it's expectation. LibreOffice is less annoying in its XLSX handling.
deleted 12y ago
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- deleted 12y ago
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  - sp4ke 12y ago
    The point is not about CSV vs JSON but our responsibility as developers to stand against proprietary file formats especially in the web ...
    - autonomy77 12y ago
      Our responsibility as developers is to deliver a working solution within the parameters that we are given, not to push an agenda (no matter how strongly we may feel about it). Like it or not, most of the businesses in the developed world are still using MS and the associated file formats, and will be for quite a while yet.
    - squeaky-clean 12y ago
      What responsibility to stand against proprietary formats do we have? That was never my goal when becoming a developer. I want to make simple and useful tools for people, and a .xls file is the most simple and useful format when the goal is to edit data in Excel (which is the goal 99% of the time when you're not dealing with another developer). Of course open formats are best, but sometimes they're not a good option.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
sp4ke 12y ago
Sorry but this would only keep the proprietary file format madness that is Excel. I would prefer to share the data in JSON and let the user decide what to do with it ...
- smcgivern 12y ago
  The premise of the article is that the user will want to manipulate the data in Excel, so developers should provide an Excel export instead of / as well as CSV. In this case, JSON is much, much worse than CSV.
- fphhotchips 12y ago
  Unless your end user is a developer, that's a distinctly unfriendly way to treat your users. Did you read the article? The point is that non-developer end users will never use CSV in anything but a spreadsheet, and Excel is the most prominent of those. To give it to them in JSON is, well, just useless.
- squeaky-clean 12y ago
  The majority of users have no idea what JSON is or how to even open it. So "decide what to do with it" will equate to trash it and find another website.
- calciphus 12y ago
  A lovely sentiment, but one made in total denial of reality. Handing your average user a JSON file doesn't "let them decide", it means you've decided that their needs are less important than your holy war. That's fine, and your choice to make as a developer (unless they're paying you), but don't pretend it's in the user's best interest.
- CountHackulus 12y ago
  That doesn't solve the lossless encoding of doubles problem.
  - stephencanon 12y ago
    Lossless encoding of doubles is a long solved problem. Use hexadecimal floating point format (%a with printf in C99, inherited by most high-level languages that sit on top of C). The problem is platforms that still don't support C99.
kubiiii 12y ago
An alternative is to provide data as ressources that can be imported using Excel web queries. I don't thnik vanilla excel can be linked to JSON ressources, but a simple HTML table does the trick. Excel Web queries can use parameters, making the use of several ressources faster vs the download of several files. As a bonus you can set the Excel file for the client, with your data ready and up to date in it.
oheard 12y ago
Is there any reason why the open ODS format would not be a better alternative for those of us concerned about open standards?
- justincormack 12y ago
  You should also provide it, but some people may not be able to use it with their tools.
  - the_why_of_y 12y ago
    At least MS Office 2007 and later support ODF import/export.
wluu 12y ago
There's also the Open Xml SDK, written in C# and works with Mono (in addition to .NET on Windows) https://github.com/OfficeDev/Open-XML-SDK https://github.com/OfficeDev/Open-XML-SDK Someone has also created a javascript version of the SDK - http://openxmlsdkjs.codeplex.com/ http://openxmlsdkjs.codeplex.com/
- taspeotis 12y ago
  If you're using .NET I would recommend looking at EPPlus instead: http://epplus.codeplex.com/ http://epplus.codeplex.com/
omonra 12y ago
As a user, I agree 100%. The only way I use CSV files is to import them in Excel. I've always assumed that programmers output to CSV because they are too lazy to implement an Excel output function.
- weaksauce 12y ago
  As a developer, it hasn't been easy to make an excel file in the past and it's not a core feature for the business so it gets relegated to a mediocre CSV implementation with minimal effort.
- bsg75 12y ago
  CSV can be consumed by anything (with the caveats mentioned in the article), XLS/XLSX by spreadsheets only )if you want to work with the data). Excel files have row limitations, potential file format incompatibilities. Depending on the language being used, it can be the same level of effort to emit XLS file as a CSV file, so unless we are talking about programmers how don't bother learning how to use output libraries, I suspect CSV is more common for reasons of compatibility.
  - omonra 12y ago
    "CSV can be consumed by anything" That's the thing. For 99.99% of users there is no anything. There is only Excel. And dealing with CSV files is headache for them. It's as if you designed parking garages to accommodate both horses and cars - because someone out there might be coming on a horse.
    - bsg75 12y ago
      99.99% is a made-up stat, and highly dependent on audience. Noting Excel can open CSV natively (again with the caveats mentioned in the post), my users want a garage not limited to cars, but trucks and bicycles too.
- deleted 12y ago
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codeulike 12y ago
In all likelihood they are going to open your CSV file in Microsoft Excel 2004, or if you're lucky Microsoft Excel 2007 When did he write this? It says Nov 2014 at the top but that doesn't seem accurate.
- Demiurge 12y ago
  He also mentioned pandas, which isn't that old. So, it's probably hyperbole.
  - NamTaf 12y ago
    It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest that the corporate envronment still uses Excel 2003 (? not 2004, I thought?) or maybe 2007 rather than 2013. Then again the WinXP EoL should have changed that, but watch it not have.
    - ZenoArrow 12y ago
      Excel 2004 is basically the Mac version of Excel 2003. It's EoL'd too. As for the article, personally I'd say drop XLS support and go for XLSX. The more that users are aware their version of Excel is no longer supported, the more noise they'll make about wanting upgrades. Plus, it's not limiting, in the sense you can get free tools that open XLSX (LibreOffice, etc...). I would imagine there'd be XLSX-handling libraries for most mainstream programming languages. I've used XlsxWriter with Python, it's fairly intuitive... https://xlsxwriter.readthedocs.org/ https://xlsxwriter.readthedocs.org/
      - bradleyland 12y ago
        We do a ton of Excel import/export in our web app. The day we moved to XLSX, every one of our users cheered because the reliability of our Excel related features improved dramatically. The problem with XLS is that its internal format (called BIFF8) has no official specification. It has been reverse engineered to a great degree, but every implementation I've used outside of actual "excel.exe" has show stopping bugs that you will encounter at some point. XLSX, on the other hand, has an actual published spec (OOXML). There is plenty of political strife surrounding OOXML, but at least we have a spec we can develop against. It has also been my experience that "simple" XLSX files can be constructed more reliably than their BIFF8 counterparts. Because XLSX files are XML internally, there are a great number of libraries that can be used to construct the required XML structures, while avoiding edge-case errors in composition that are inherent to reverse-engineered binary formats. At a bare minimum, software authors can use something like libxml to construct valid XML, rather than some ad hoc BIFF8 serializer. FWIW, we use the axlsx gem for our Ruby app, and it hasn't let us down yet. It even supports some pretty eccentric Excel features like data validations.
jjs3979 12y ago
Just expose an odata endpoint than can be consumed by excel, various other analytic tools as well as whatever programming language you want since it is just rest.
- hobs 12y ago
  So for users that we are thinking are going to have too much trouble converting a csv to an excel document, we will instead use a custom data source. I dont think that solution really works for people using it at the level he is talking about.
codingdave 12y ago
"Data is ultimately meant to be consumed by people." I disagree. Information is consumed by people. Data underlies information, and sometimes is mistaken for it. But raw data is absolutely parsed and processed before being consumed by the average audience. Some analytic folk will read raw data, but only to serve a higher level purpose - to answer some question or gain some knowledge. But in general, data is analyzed and filtered and summarized and visualized before being consumed. This author may just work too close to the data on a day to day basis to realize where the average audience really fits.
- Sir_Substance 12y ago
  That was my interpretation as well. If we want to talk about ease of use for the consumer, we need to ask what kind of person downloads datasets from websites. Not normal people, that's for sure. The target demographic for that is probably 5% researchers and 95% idly curious developers and statisticians. The researchers can take the time to deal with an XLS format, but why would they want to? The developers and statisticians are doing this in their off time, and are going to want or need (I wouldn't expect a statistician to be able to work with the XLS documentation) an easier format to deal with. So if you give it to them in XLS, they're just going to have to turn it into a CSV immediately before starting to hack up an interpreter for it. So why not skip the middle man and deliver it in CSV? This author has the situation almost exactly 180 degrees backwards.
dpweb 12y ago
I was doing CSV but couldn't get multiple files into the same sheet (tabs). I had 20 CSVs to download I didn't need 20 different files. I work in JSON mostly do wrapped the excellent XLSX library it was very useful https://goo.gl/S7rlFm https://goo.gl/S7rlFm
microcolonel 12y ago
CSV export is for Numbers users, I think. Apple has failed to support OpenDocument Spreadsheets, and their XLS importer regularly crashes altogether for the operations people at my office, though maybe it's super stable elsewhere.
- Someone 12y ago
  In my experience, Numbers doesn't even import XLS anymore. XLSX works fine, though (for the features that Numbers supports)
volker48 12y ago
"When they export their data as CSV, they’ll probably just bring it into Excel first to have a look around." If the first thing the the user is doing is bringing the file into excel and you don't need multiple tables per file what is the difference to the end user other than the file having a csv instead of a xls or xlsx file extension?
- onethree 12y ago
  its right there in the article: Dates, times, and durations; Percentages; Number formatting the number of times i've opened a csv to find that excel has tried to determine the dates, and decided that the year thats being referred to is 1914 instead of 2014...
  - michaelt 12y ago
    But you could get all those benefits by just testing your csv loads OK into excel.
  - volker48 12y ago
    I've never had an issue like you describe with dates before. I've always output them in the csv in Y-m-d format and that has worked as expected. I should have been more precise and said if your data isn't using the set of features described in the article there isn't a big difference. Not all data has dates, time durations, percentages, and number formatting.
tomlock 12y ago
I'm a long term enterprise user of Excel, and I taught myself to program using VB6 and have now moved onto Postgres/Python etc. For any serious data application, CSV is a must, because navigating data types in Excel is a nightmare. Over and over, colleagues of mine have lost the leading zero in a string because Excel automatically typed it as a number, or had a cell value interpreted as a formula, or had a VLOOKUP not work because the number is typed as a string or vice versa. These problems often have counterintuitive solutions, and for a basic user, these issues exist in both excel formats and in csv. Excel has pretty robust ODBC integration that drives data directly into Pivot Tables or through VBA. In this way you can provide informative (and pretty) reports to end users, with dynamic aggregations, filters etc. If your users are more technical than that or require more detailed atomic data, the widely compatible solution is generally csv. What I'm trying to say is that the excel format fills a gap that is very small, between completely non-technical and slightly technical data users, and honestly probably isn't worth implementing.
nickporter 12y ago
I have a product that lets our users (who are non-technical) export data. CSV exports were a source of many support requests. We switched to XLSX exports and everybody seems happy.
bane 12y ago
I've seen a weird hack where an export to excel option was provided, but what was actually exported was an html file of some sort with a .xls extension that happened to open fine in Excel. I think it even had different tabs. If you just create a text file and put an old fashioned html table in it and rename it to .xls Excel will complain a little, and then open it, and even respect font tags like <b> and <i>
- troels 12y ago
  xls is a catch-all extension for a bunch of formats that Excel (the program) will interpret. See my comment below about SpreadsheetML.
sebastianavina 12y ago
I use Google Refine (OpenRefine you name it) for exploring data, it's more powerful than excel for visualizations, have a lot of ways to order it. It's amazing.

57 points by smcgivern 12y ago

For PHP, I can recommend https://github.com/PHPOffice/PHPExcel https://github.com/PHPOffice/PHPExcel.

xlslib, at a brief glance, looks like it is based on the .xsl format, not .xlsx. Wondering if it is easier to generate .xlsx XML files for export, or not.

skeletonjelly 12y ago
They're totally different formats. It'd have to be a separate implementation. xls is binary, xlsx is XML based.
- troels 12y ago
  xls is not just one format. There are several formats which Excel will understand, that uses that extension. One of them is a real simple xml-based format (SpreadsheetML), that is way easier to generate than proper excel files and has most of the features you need (At least for data transport purpose). Highly recommend using it.
  - Mikhail_Edoshin 12y ago
    I second SpreadsheetML; it's plain XML (not multi-part compressed .xslx) and it supports multiple sheets, formulas, formatting, and some other bits like named ranges, print settings, and such.
    - justincormack 12y ago
      Ok,so is there a simple implementation guide/library?
      - Mikhail_Edoshin 12y ago
        Yes, here it is: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa140066%28office.10%29.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa140066%28office.10... It only describes the data part and doesn't document Excel options such as print settings and filters; if you need them, create a sample in Excel, save it as XML Spreadsheet 2003 and examine the result. (The 'big' Excel format that is a part of Office Open XML format is also called Spreadsheet ML, but they're different; from what I understand this one is a subset.)
        the_why_of_y 12y ago
        It's a deprecated format that was essentially Microsoft's first experiment at an XML based format in the Office XP/Office 2003 days... whether it will continue to be supported in future versions is anybody's guess, given that the successor format OOXML is much more widely adopted.
        Mikhail_Edoshin 12y ago
        My impression is that Microsoft is fairly reliable when it comes to supporting old formats and standards. E.g. I can still send Word and Excel DDE commands and this is a tech from 90s, Windows 3.1 and stuff. OOXML is certainly more powerful, but it's also more complex.
      - troels 12y ago
        Here's a really basic implementation that I used in some code as a drop-in replacement for csv: https://gist.github.com/troelskn/cf9df474662c88ba7951 https://gist.github.com/troelskn/cf9df474662c88ba7951
- justincormack 12y ago
  I know that they are totally different, wondering if xlsx is simpler so that it would be easier code, or whether it is just as complex really, and not suer what real world compatibility is.
tealeg 12y ago
Nearly 4 years ago I wrote a library in Go to read XLSX - that was trivial. It's grown over time, and this year it started growing feature that allow it to write XLSX format. This is a whole different ball game - Microsoft Excel is really picky about what it will and won't accept. In most cases Excel will simply moan and do an automated repair on files that don't match exactly it's expectation. LibreOffice is less annoying in its XLSX handling.

deleted 12y ago

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deleted 12y ago
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- sp4ke 12y ago
  The point is not about CSV vs JSON but our responsibility as developers to stand against proprietary file formats especially in the web ...
  - autonomy77 12y ago
    Our responsibility as developers is to deliver a working solution within the parameters that we are given, not to push an agenda (no matter how strongly we may feel about it). Like it or not, most of the businesses in the developed world are still using MS and the associated file formats, and will be for quite a while yet.
  - squeaky-clean 12y ago
    What responsibility to stand against proprietary formats do we have? That was never my goal when becoming a developer. I want to make simple and useful tools for people, and a .xls file is the most simple and useful format when the goal is to edit data in Excel (which is the goal 99% of the time when you're not dealing with another developer). Of course open formats are best, but sometimes they're not a good option.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

sp4ke 12y ago

Sorry but this would only keep the proprietary file format madness that is Excel. I would prefer to share the data in JSON and let the user decide what to do with it ...

smcgivern 12y ago
The premise of the article is that the user will want to manipulate the data in Excel, so developers should provide an Excel export instead of / as well as CSV. In this case, JSON is much, much worse than CSV.
fphhotchips 12y ago
Unless your end user is a developer, that's a distinctly unfriendly way to treat your users. Did you read the article? The point is that non-developer end users will never use CSV in anything but a spreadsheet, and Excel is the most prominent of those. To give it to them in JSON is, well, just useless.
squeaky-clean 12y ago
The majority of users have no idea what JSON is or how to even open it. So "decide what to do with it" will equate to trash it and find another website.
calciphus 12y ago
A lovely sentiment, but one made in total denial of reality. Handing your average user a JSON file doesn't "let them decide", it means you've decided that their needs are less important than your holy war. That's fine, and your choice to make as a developer (unless they're paying you), but don't pretend it's in the user's best interest.
CountHackulus 12y ago
That doesn't solve the lossless encoding of doubles problem.
- stephencanon 12y ago
  Lossless encoding of doubles is a long solved problem. Use hexadecimal floating point format (%a with printf in C99, inherited by most high-level languages that sit on top of C). The problem is platforms that still don't support C99.

kubiiii 12y ago

An alternative is to provide data as ressources that can be imported using Excel web queries. I don't thnik vanilla excel can be linked to JSON ressources, but a simple HTML table does the trick. Excel Web queries can use parameters, making the use of several ressources faster vs the download of several files. As a bonus you can set the Excel file for the client, with your data ready and up to date in it.

oheard 12y ago

Is there any reason why the open ODS format would not be a better alternative for those of us concerned about open standards?

justincormack 12y ago
You should also provide it, but some people may not be able to use it with their tools.
- the_why_of_y 12y ago
  At least MS Office 2007 and later support ODF import/export.

wluu 12y ago

There's also the Open Xml SDK, written in C# and works with Mono (in addition to .NET on Windows) https://github.com/OfficeDev/Open-XML-SDK https://github.com/OfficeDev/Open-XML-SDK Someone has also created a javascript version of the SDK - http://openxmlsdkjs.codeplex.com/ http://openxmlsdkjs.codeplex.com/

taspeotis 12y ago
If you're using .NET I would recommend looking at EPPlus instead: http://epplus.codeplex.com/ http://epplus.codeplex.com/

omonra 12y ago

As a user, I agree 100%. The only way I use CSV files is to import them in Excel. I've always assumed that programmers output to CSV because they are too lazy to implement an Excel output function.

weaksauce 12y ago
As a developer, it hasn't been easy to make an excel file in the past and it's not a core feature for the business so it gets relegated to a mediocre CSV implementation with minimal effort.
bsg75 12y ago
CSV can be consumed by anything (with the caveats mentioned in the article), XLS/XLSX by spreadsheets only )if you want to work with the data). Excel files have row limitations, potential file format incompatibilities. Depending on the language being used, it can be the same level of effort to emit XLS file as a CSV file, so unless we are talking about programmers how don't bother learning how to use output libraries, I suspect CSV is more common for reasons of compatibility.
- omonra 12y ago
  "CSV can be consumed by anything" That's the thing. For 99.99% of users there is no anything. There is only Excel. And dealing with CSV files is headache for them. It's as if you designed parking garages to accommodate both horses and cars - because someone out there might be coming on a horse.
  - bsg75 12y ago
    99.99% is a made-up stat, and highly dependent on audience. Noting Excel can open CSV natively (again with the caveats mentioned in the post), my users want a garage not limited to cars, but trucks and bicycles too.
deleted 12y ago
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codeulike 12y ago

In all likelihood they are going to open your CSV file in Microsoft Excel 2004, or if you're lucky Microsoft Excel 2007 When did he write this? It says Nov 2014 at the top but that doesn't seem accurate.

Demiurge 12y ago
He also mentioned pandas, which isn't that old. So, it's probably hyperbole.
- NamTaf 12y ago
  It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest that the corporate envronment still uses Excel 2003 (? not 2004, I thought?) or maybe 2007 rather than 2013. Then again the WinXP EoL should have changed that, but watch it not have.
  - ZenoArrow 12y ago
    Excel 2004 is basically the Mac version of Excel 2003. It's EoL'd too. As for the article, personally I'd say drop XLS support and go for XLSX. The more that users are aware their version of Excel is no longer supported, the more noise they'll make about wanting upgrades. Plus, it's not limiting, in the sense you can get free tools that open XLSX (LibreOffice, etc...). I would imagine there'd be XLSX-handling libraries for most mainstream programming languages. I've used XlsxWriter with Python, it's fairly intuitive... https://xlsxwriter.readthedocs.org/ https://xlsxwriter.readthedocs.org/
    - bradleyland 12y ago
      We do a ton of Excel import/export in our web app. The day we moved to XLSX, every one of our users cheered because the reliability of our Excel related features improved dramatically. The problem with XLS is that its internal format (called BIFF8) has no official specification. It has been reverse engineered to a great degree, but every implementation I've used outside of actual "excel.exe" has show stopping bugs that you will encounter at some point. XLSX, on the other hand, has an actual published spec (OOXML). There is plenty of political strife surrounding OOXML, but at least we have a spec we can develop against. It has also been my experience that "simple" XLSX files can be constructed more reliably than their BIFF8 counterparts. Because XLSX files are XML internally, there are a great number of libraries that can be used to construct the required XML structures, while avoiding edge-case errors in composition that are inherent to reverse-engineered binary formats. At a bare minimum, software authors can use something like libxml to construct valid XML, rather than some ad hoc BIFF8 serializer. FWIW, we use the axlsx gem for our Ruby app, and it hasn't let us down yet. It even supports some pretty eccentric Excel features like data validations.

jjs3979 12y ago

Just expose an odata endpoint than can be consumed by excel, various other analytic tools as well as whatever programming language you want since it is just rest.

hobs 12y ago
So for users that we are thinking are going to have too much trouble converting a csv to an excel document, we will instead use a custom data source. I dont think that solution really works for people using it at the level he is talking about.

codingdave 12y ago

"Data is ultimately meant to be consumed by people." I disagree. Information is consumed by people. Data underlies information, and sometimes is mistaken for it. But raw data is absolutely parsed and processed before being consumed by the average audience. Some analytic folk will read raw data, but only to serve a higher level purpose - to answer some question or gain some knowledge. But in general, data is analyzed and filtered and summarized and visualized before being consumed. This author may just work too close to the data on a day to day basis to realize where the average audience really fits.

Sir_Substance 12y ago
That was my interpretation as well. If we want to talk about ease of use for the consumer, we need to ask what kind of person downloads datasets from websites. Not normal people, that's for sure. The target demographic for that is probably 5% researchers and 95% idly curious developers and statisticians. The researchers can take the time to deal with an XLS format, but why would they want to? The developers and statisticians are doing this in their off time, and are going to want or need (I wouldn't expect a statistician to be able to work with the XLS documentation) an easier format to deal with. So if you give it to them in XLS, they're just going to have to turn it into a CSV immediately before starting to hack up an interpreter for it. So why not skip the middle man and deliver it in CSV? This author has the situation almost exactly 180 degrees backwards.

dpweb 12y ago

I was doing CSV but couldn't get multiple files into the same sheet (tabs). I had 20 CSVs to download I didn't need 20 different files. I work in JSON mostly do wrapped the excellent XLSX library it was very useful https://goo.gl/S7rlFm https://goo.gl/S7rlFm

microcolonel 12y ago

CSV export is for Numbers users, I think. Apple has failed to support OpenDocument Spreadsheets, and their XLS importer regularly crashes altogether for the operations people at my office, though maybe it's super stable elsewhere.

Someone 12y ago
In my experience, Numbers doesn't even import XLS anymore. XLSX works fine, though (for the features that Numbers supports)

volker48 12y ago

"When they export their data as CSV, they’ll probably just bring it into Excel first to have a look around." If the first thing the the user is doing is bringing the file into excel and you don't need multiple tables per file what is the difference to the end user other than the file having a csv instead of a xls or xlsx file extension?

onethree 12y ago
its right there in the article: Dates, times, and durations; Percentages; Number formatting the number of times i've opened a csv to find that excel has tried to determine the dates, and decided that the year thats being referred to is 1914 instead of 2014...
- michaelt 12y ago
  But you could get all those benefits by just testing your csv loads OK into excel.
- volker48 12y ago
  I've never had an issue like you describe with dates before. I've always output them in the csv in Y-m-d format and that has worked as expected. I should have been more precise and said if your data isn't using the set of features described in the article there isn't a big difference. Not all data has dates, time durations, percentages, and number formatting.

tomlock 12y ago

I'm a long term enterprise user of Excel, and I taught myself to program using VB6 and have now moved onto Postgres/Python etc. For any serious data application, CSV is a must, because navigating data types in Excel is a nightmare. Over and over, colleagues of mine have lost the leading zero in a string because Excel automatically typed it as a number, or had a cell value interpreted as a formula, or had a VLOOKUP not work because the number is typed as a string or vice versa. These problems often have counterintuitive solutions, and for a basic user, these issues exist in both excel formats and in csv. Excel has pretty robust ODBC integration that drives data directly into Pivot Tables or through VBA. In this way you can provide informative (and pretty) reports to end users, with dynamic aggregations, filters etc. If your users are more technical than that or require more detailed atomic data, the widely compatible solution is generally csv. What I'm trying to say is that the excel format fills a gap that is very small, between completely non-technical and slightly technical data users, and honestly probably isn't worth implementing.

nickporter 12y ago

I have a product that lets our users (who are non-technical) export data. CSV exports were a source of many support requests. We switched to XLSX exports and everybody seems happy.

bane 12y ago

I've seen a weird hack where an export to excel option was provided, but what was actually exported was an html file of some sort with a .xls extension that happened to open fine in Excel. I think it even had different tabs. If you just create a text file and put an old fashioned html table in it and rename it to .xls Excel will complain a little, and then open it, and even respect font tags like <b> and <i>

troels 12y ago
xls is a catch-all extension for a bunch of formats that Excel (the program) will interpret. See my comment below about SpreadsheetML.

sebastianavina 12y ago

I use Google Refine (OpenRefine you name it) for exploring data, it's more powerful than excel for visualizations, have a lot of ways to order it. It's amazing.