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Comment by justinsaccount | Hacker News Reader

> Excel is a good tool for working with CSVs > Excel is an OK tool for working with CSVs > Excel can losslessly save CSVs it opens

Seriously. It's amazing how fast excel can corrupt a simple csv file.

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I've had odd bugs show up in a CSV import process, where it was a numeric string (think account numbers) that had leading zeros. Turned out the imported CSV had been cleaned by moving records around in Excel and saving as CSV (which of course saw the account numbers as numerics and conveniently truncated the zeros)

Excel thinks anything vaguely scientific notation-ish is a float, which is a nightmare if you have, for example, four hexadecimal digits 2E15 which is 11797 in decimal but excel will helpfuly "fix" it to 2 million billion (depending on your locale of billion LOL)

That was a contrived example but I've seen Excel get very confused by foreign postal codes involving digits surrounding a letter "E" or apartment number columns for example "1E"

Excel enthusiastically and automatically types oh-so-many things. It'll take dates and assume they are in american MM/DD/YYYY in some fields and then treat dates in the same column like 13/01/1986 as strings.

That exact problem I had when working with a company who had a stocked item with the code "060E2". When people don't know scientific notation the result is bewildering!!!

excel doesn't use comma by default as separator on comma separated value files, enouh said.

Even more surprisingly, this is locale dependent. So the US developer never sees this problem, but the European user does.

Employee IDs. That is [not even close to] all. Sadly.

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