Comment by DonHopkins | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DonHopkins | Hacker News Reader

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Excel mis-identifies CSV files whose first column is named "ID" as SYLK files.

But who would EVER think of naming the first column of a spreadsheet "ID"?

https://www.optibrium.com/community/forums/6-general-how-do-...

>Q: I have saved the result table from admensa into .csv format. However I am not able to open in excel. It is said that SYLK: file format is not valid. Do you have any experience on it? Thanks.

>A: This is an Excel 'feature.' I would guess that the first column of your data is entitled "ID". For some reason, Excel interprets any CSV file beginning with "ID" as an SYLK format file (not really sure what that is!). If you edit the file in, say, Notepad and change the name of the first column in the header row, you should find that it will load without a problem.

>This will happen if you save a CSV file from any application with the first characters "ID". So, unfortunately, there's not much we can do about it, other than to recommend that users don't call their first column "ID"!

Excel actually mostly ignores the extension and relies on heuristics to detect the file type on load. Many web applications used to implement "XLS export" by writing out CSV file with .xls extension.

This magic detection of file type has one unfortunate side effect: it is not exactly obvious how to convince Excel to load plain text data that is not CSV with delimiters from the current locale. (which is major PITA with most European locales where Excel uses "Semicolon"-SV and not "Comma"-SV but still calls it CSV)

You’ll have to excuse me because I’m not in front of a windows computer right now, but if you open excel first, there is a data tab on the ribbon and an import data wizard or something like that and you can tell it what the delimiter is. You can also apply types to columns and whatnot before importing. Not the quickest but does help extract the data.

This is a fairly new feature in Excel.

The lack of this feature pushed a lot of scientists to OpenOffice/LibreOffice Calc. At first, just to open the file and "Save as Excel", but of course, then they start using Calc.

(At least that's my experience writing scientific software in Europe. Excel localized not just display, but the input and output. With Calc you could just open a file as "pipe separated UTF-8" and be done with it.)

If you rename your .csv as .txt then you get a wizard where you can choose delimiters, etc. This works in Excel 2000. I don't have an older version to hand.

I'm aware of that. But that is also partly my point, before ribbon there was 'File->Import...' which did essentially the same thing but at least for me (and many users I work with) was more discoverable.

Another thing is that LO Calc will present you with text import dialog when you open anything vaguely text like and also when you paste multiline plain text from clipboard.

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