Submitted 2 days ago by xia@lemmy.ca to rant@lemmy.sdf.org
Yeah, I get it… the formatting goes away… why so alarmist? And is the formatting really “data” anyway?
Because not all CSV are comma delineated values, annoyingly my bank uses colon delineated values because commas are used as decimal divider in my part of the world.
And as excel doesn’t give a shit about non US formated stuff it always leads to issues.
At my job IT would regularly advise employees to open “CSV” files with Libre Office because it nicely asks you upfront how it should be handled. With sane defaults and easy to understand adjustments.
Excel just assumes stuff and fuck you, if you think otherwise. I think theoretically you can get Excel to import CSVs created under different standards but it’s burried somewhere in submenus. And good luck if the file has different encoding than your OS.
dohpaz42@lemmy.world 1 day ago That is interesting. It’s been a llng time since I’ve used Excel or CSV, but I could’ve awore that you just needed to set some option to quote everything and that would allow commas in the data; i.e. “One, two, and three”,”something else”,”1.320,42”
I’m a web developer that lets people to export to CSV and quoting things is usually the answer. Though for a number with a comma in it I’d rather not quote it and leave it as a bare integer/decimal so that the data type is correctly inferred.
Speaking of, I have a handful of hacks I do specifically for Excel so that it infers types correctly — it needs more prodding than other applications importing CSV.
wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
It loses a lot more than just formatting. Formulas, any graphics, graphs/charts, it only saves the active sheet. And formatting can be super important with date values.