And the answer to that is always no. You will it think it's yes because it works for you, but when you send it to someone who has a different Excel version or simply different regional settings, it won't work. The recipient will first have to figure out what dialect you used to export.
You want people to be able to open your nice and sensible CSV files in Excel? First figure out which arcane locale specific settings you need, then generate those monstrosities and annoy anyone who genuinely expected Unicode comma-separated values.
My solution was to just write a generic spreadsheet writer component in our API and have it generate CSV (normal, comma-separated, UTF-8), XLSX, or ODS. Anyone using Excel just grabs the XLSX output. Generating XLSX and ODS was just a matter of saving a minimal example file for each and figuring out where to write cells and rows. No extra library needed (both file formats are just zipped up XML files), and everybody is happy.
I get the sentiment -- when I request data through FOIA, I will almost always request it as "an excel format" because I know that I'll at least be able to import it. CSV is much less of a guarantee and will have issues -- missing quotes, wrong delimiters, inconsistent column counts, things like that. So requesting "an excel format" implies "make the best effort to give me something that will load in my excel, but without asking what version of excel I have". Removes a fair amount of hassle, especially when it took months to get the data. It also means that if they fuck up the columns by doing a conversion, you have some means of telling them that the data is simply wrong, rather than the data is hard to work with. It does mean dealing with [0-9]+GB sized excel files sometimes, though.
That all said, I prefer to share CSV files. Haven't had much of a problem with it and I can guarantee some consistency from my side. Like, the people I share files with aren't going to know what the hell a parquet file is. A CSV though? Just double click it if you're less technical, or open it up in less if you can use a terminal. It usually compresses well, despite what the author wrote.
> when I request data through FOIA
https://mchap.io/that-time-the-city-of-seattle-accidentally-...
Also, even if the CSV format is completely valid, Excel will still find a way to misinterpret some of your cells in baffling ways, destroying the original data in the process if you don't notice it in time.
Someone should write a simple utility modelled on LibreOffice's CSV import dialog that reads in a CSV file and outputs its content as an XLSX file with all the cells formatted as text. Being as how XLSX files are just XML text in a renamed ZIP file and CSV is a very simple format such a project could be written over a weekend.
Network admins could then create a group policy to reassign the CSV file extension to open with the utility instead of Excel. I guess the utility could automatically open the generated XLSX in Excel as well.
This would fix so many data corruption issues across the whole world.
Microsoft themselves could even do this as a powertoy.
> And the answer to that is always no.
Sorry, you are wrong! You are confusing "No" and "Yes, after a quick setup at most".
Warning you about M$, you will soon be an enterprise dev.
So why remain stuck importing CSVs into Excel when you can use Power Query to import Parquet. Why remain stuck using VBA in Excel when you can use Python in Excel.
I do not think an Excel user can be convinced to move to things like Jupyter, R, databases, etc. since they won't even make the jump to Access but maybe they can be convinced to use modern features of Excel.