> Excel single-handedly redeems Microsoft from being a pure drain on human existence

Debatable. Excel can't even open CSV files properly. You need to run the import wizard. But loads of people don't do this. They see a file on their desktop and double click it. Why can't double clicking a CSV file just open the import wizard!? (Because they want people to share xlsx files as a data format.)

▲ withinboredom 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

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.

▲ fnord123 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Right but the import wizard can fix things. They just don't make the double-click go through the import wizard - and people use 'open' or double-click their files. LibreOffice Calc opens the import wizard when you open a csv and it's fine.

▲ kergonath 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

For the life of me I cannot comprehend why they cannot let us choose the decimal separator independently from the locale. Or for fuck’s sake, just be smart about it. My desktop is for boring administrative tasks, of course I want it in my language. No, I don’t want to manually change settings in Word for every fucking document I create because ~none of them will be in English. But then why do I have to search-and-replace . with , or click 12 times through an inane bullshit wizard just to paste some data in Excel?

	▲	SturgeonsLaw 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Respecting regional settings is so inconsistent among Office applications. The desktop ones usually get it, but online is a crapshoot. Whenever there's a date like 3/4/25 I get the play the fun guessing game of whether that's March or April. For Project Online, the most reliable way I found to fix it was to manually edit the URL to replace en-US with en-AU, then bookmark that.

▲ herbst 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Americans don't use CSV?

▲ withinboredom 5 days ago | parent [-]

Depending on whether your OS uses a , or a . for decimal numbers changes how excel will parse a CSV file. Americans use a . for decimal numbers, so it will parse it as a CSV. Other countries use a , for decimal numbers, so it will parse it as a SSV (semi-colon separated) and everything will be in a single column.

To make matters worse, randomly, employees will have their OS using US or GB locales so that if you distribute a CSV, it will work for some employees, but not for others.

▲ deanishe 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Excel's behaviour is almost as annoying. It's basically impossible to produce a correctly-formatted German document on an English OS and vice-versa.

▲ ozlikethewizard 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

this seems like less of an excel problem and more of an issue with an improperly escaped data set though?

	▲	withinboredom 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		No. Excel changes the SEPERATOR when parsing depending on the locale settings. This means a CSV generated or saved with a decimal of . will not be able to be opened by one with a , and vice-versa. This is an Excel issue, as it doesn’t even try to determine or ask which separator to use. Hence why the comment above said you need to use the import wizard and not double click.

▲ herbst 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't know any of these problems. I use a modern operating system and office suite that supports CSV not a specific subset and syntax of it.

▲ rickdeckard 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

The syntax that MS Office uses to read/write a CSV is defined by the Regional Settings of your PC.

Open control-panel for regional settings, select "Advanced settings" button on the bottom control.exe intl.cpl

If you don't know any of these problems, then all the people and systems you work with have a "." as decimal and "," as separator, and you are spared from the hell of MS Office being unable to overrule these OS-settings when treating a CSV

▲

herbst 5 days ago | parent [-]

Honestly as this always was an obvious issue I usually just used ; and never got a complain. Obviously both . And , are used way to often not only for numbers. I am surprised this is problem enough (in 2025) that people emotionally discuss it.

	▲	rickdeckard 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Honestly as this always was an obvious issue I usually just used ; and never got a complain. Thing is, it is not about what you used, you are not able to control this from happening when your CSV should work for people in other countries. Whatever configuration you used which never got a complain, if your recipients also used Excel to work with those documents, they probably have the same regional setting on Windows for list/thousands/decimal separator. If you use ";" as separator, i.e. Excel in UK, US, Japan, China, Korea will not be able to correctly open your CSV. But even better: If you created this CSV on a France or Sweden regional setting, the thousands separator will be a whitespace ("1 000" instead "1,000" or "1.000"), so Excel in e.g. Italy will not detect those properly. > I am surprised this is problem enough (in 2025) that people emotionally discuss it. It is a (intentional) weakness of MS Office for those who work in an international environment, because Excel links itself to .csv files to hinder the experience, as it is neither able to properly detect them nor guide their users through a process to properly handle them.

▲ mattmanser 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

1.01 in US === 1,01 in EU

   1.01, "hi", CSV has problems, "1.01"
   1,01, "hi", Yes it really does, "1,01"

See the problem now?

Your operating system cannot solve this problem.

▲

account42 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

CSV already solved this problem with quotes. Maybe not the most convenient solution for some users but that's no excuse for the Excel behavior of making up a different format depending on the locale.

	▲	mbreese 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Excel really doesn't care what users think. I mean, in biology, we've already had to change the names of genes to accommodate Excel's auto-date conversion routines. So, why would it care to have globally consistent CSV formats?

▲

herbst 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Is this 2025? Why would any software safe it invalid like that to begin with?

▲

johnisgood 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Not all of EU though. I am European and I never used "," anywhere yet people understood.

▲

johnisgood 5 days ago | parent [-]

I don't understand the down-votes, but okay, have it your way, lmao. Someone really hates dots.

▲

rickdeckard 5 days ago | parent [-]

I guess the downvotes are because you also didn't understand the context.

It's not about people, it's about the Windows locale setting and how MS Excel interprets a CSV-file when you doubleclick it

	▲	johnisgood 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, I agree with that and I find it frustrating.

▲ lisbbb 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

	▲	BolexNOLA 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Maybe I’m just not understanding the nuances of what you were working on, but is it possible that there was something wrong with the solution if literally every person was screwing it up?

▲ kcoddington 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

▲ Ygg2 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> 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.

	▲	rickdeckard 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		yeah, what Excel does is, it assumes the comma and separator of your regional settings and doesn't care if it fails or not. > In practice, a CSV file can decide to use `\|` for comma, and `<>` instead of quotes. Ofc it is. Now try to edit that CSV with Excel and save it again in that format.