I assume most Americans don't run into the CSV hell that other countries do. In my current country, whether CSVs open as a comma-separated or semi-colon seperated document depends on whether the OS is set to use a , or a . for decimal numbers. It's absolutely annoying.

OMG--we had a worfklow where less-techy folks were supposed to edit a csv, then check it in to github, which would kick off a whole process automatically for them. I kid you not--anyone who edited the csv in Excel would eff the whole file up every single time! They just needed a text editor, which we told them to use, and the changes were literally simple, either editing an existing entry or adding a new entry. Nope, these college educated "IT" workers could not handle it! We ended up having to scrap the entire automation workflow because the employees were simply too dumb to use a text editor and github.

CSV is data only. Excel handles way more than that. XLSX is the preferred file format because it's compressed XML that can hold all kinds of things.

Also, CSVs seem to open just fine on my Excel. If it's not formatted with a standard delimiter or isn't handing quoted strings the proper way, sure maybe the data wizard is needed.

Excel is terrible in a lot of aspects, but CSVs seem to be something it handles as well as anything else in my experience.

> Excel can't even open CSV files properly. You need to run the import wizard.

Ofc you do. In practice, a CSV file can decide to use `|` for comma, and `<>` instead of quotes.

Much like iOS/Android & the Web killed MSFTs stranglehold on OSes, google docs & markdown killed MSFT office's stranglehold on office. So many businesses are google doc shops, vast majority of schools are google docs, vast majority of casual document usage is google docs and google docs is open-enough with it's export formats.

Excel at this point is specialist software, like adobe photoshop. Everything else is 'good enough'.

That's being charitable to OSS office packages' UX.

Some wounds are self-inflicted, and open source has a well-known last-20%-polish problem that's especially painful in mass-user scenarios like office software.

OOo wasting the 00s with a circa-90s UI (and Oracle being assholes) is equally responsible for MS Office's continued popularity in enterprise.

Related

Cognitive Style of Powerpoint - Edward Tufte

http://makingdatatalk.com/Lecture01/Reading/Tufte-TheCogniti...

I actively prefer Libre Office.

Yes, Excel is probably a lot better if you use English setup and advanced functions.

For me,

- not having to use Norwegian for formulas (my work machine has Norwegian setup and Excel insists on using Norwegian formulas)

and

- not having it trying to find something it can misinterpret as a date, preferably some random place in a list of thousands of items

makes it worth it.

What you fail to realize is that (nearly) everything you think of as a flaw here is a key feature.

Excel allows norm(al users)ies to scale Mt Impossible from the bottom where they don't care about types, or relationships, and don't want to (because it's too abstract). They want to solve a problem. So they start with simple data given meaning by physical space, and work up from there.

It's genius. It's computing for people that will never care about pointers.

Everything you say is not wrong. But despite being so horrible, the business world still runs on excel. Finance, underwriting, accounting, engineering tools, fantasy football leagues… Excel is a highly used tool possibly the most used tool and enables many users who do not consider themselves programmers to be productive with their PCs. It’s timeless and hated by many for valid reasons, but its impact is vast.

I would dare to say that all business apps start as an Excel sheet (or Google Sheet) and after the usefulness of data collection and data arrangement/presentation is validated (often long after the usefulness is validated) they eventually become a full-fledged business web app.

And as a casual Excel user (to get data from CSV, remove some rows, move few things around, etc.) it isn't even great. You can't open two files with the same name because Excel seems to have some "global state" between windows; to the point where you might be hitting Control+Z to undo some changes, and it's undoing stuff on the other spreadsheet without you noticing.

Doing something as "simple" as a LEFT JOIN of data requires having two separate documents (or one, but saved on your system), open them in the Power Query editor (if it's the same document you do it twice, once per table) which creates two "queries", and then you can either use one to join against the other, or create a third one "joining" them. In the end, you get three new sheets on your docs: the original tables and the merged one.

Then there's the annoyances: if you use Excel in English (US at least), apparently you get a CSV separated by actual commas "," (ASCII 0x2C) but using it in Spanish (Spain) you get it separated by semicolons ";" because commas actually separate number decimals. Meaning whenever I build a program that parses/writes CSV, I need to consider the chance it's using semicolons and commas instead of commas and dots. Not that it's non-standard: CSV doesn't specify a delimiter, but you could stick to the same format everywhere, or give an option to customise, or create "Tab-Separated Values" (essentially CSV with tabs separating values).

Another one is formulae, that also change based on language, and their arguments separator also changes. In en_US you'd use `=SUBTOTAL(109,B2:B7)` while in Spanish it's `=SUBTOTALES(109;B2:B97` (plural instead of singular, and semicolon instead of comma). Meaning any guide, documentation or tutorial in English requires me having to "guess" how the function is translated, and manually changing commas to semicolons.

With all this, I mean to say: Excel isn't even that great for the "normal" user. Or perhaps I'm too "power user" for this and just lazy enough to bother with it instead of using "proper" tools like Python or R.

If pleebs can understand it, surely it’s not as foul as you state.

Nonetheless i hear your argument. I feel that python is the same abomination of the programming world. Yet it flourishes and is even loved.

Haveth we stockholm syndrome to our own garbage tools?