Posts Tagged “Excel”

Falsehoods Programmers Believe About CSVs

Comments:: 37

Tags:: Falsehoods; Excel; Encoding; CSV

By Jesse Donat on: Dec. 27, 2016

Much of my professional work for the last 10+ years has revolved around handling, importing and exporting CSV files. CSV files are frustratingly misunderstood, abused, and most of all underspecified. While RFC4180 exists, it is far from definitive and goes largely ignored.

Partially as a companion…

CSV: An Encoding Nightmare

Comments:: 22

Tags:: Strange Behaviour; Microsoft; Excel; Encoding; CSV

By Jesse Donat on: Jun. 20, 2016 (Updated: Jul. 22, 2022)

It would appear in a recent update Microsoft has added support for safely reading and writing UTF-8 CSVs to Excel. There is a new format in the save dialog CSV UTF-8 (Comma delimited) which is distinct from Comma Separated Values which is also still in there.

In my testing it appears to safely bot…