News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-out use of Excel. Parent comment

[dead]
Re:Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-... by vertere on Tuesday October 06, 2020 @03:26AM (#24695448)
I sure don't want to have to deal with people putting `="01"` in CSV files.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-... by altacc on Tuesday October 06, 2020 @04:07AM (#24695636)
We have multiple legacy systems where I work, communicating via batch csv files, some of which are authored & curated by staff in Excel. I can confirm that doing this would be a very bad thing indeed and make our systems grind to a halt.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-... by dragonwriter on Tuesday October 06, 2020 @04:28AM (#24695745)
For CSV that isn’t solely targeting Excel, hacks around the way Excel works are useless.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-... by OskarS on Tuesday October 06, 2020 @09:16AM (#24697330)
The reason you use CSV is that you want to use it with software that ISN'T Excel. Otherwise you'd just use .xlsx. No other software uses this convention, and it's not correct CSV.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-... by edejong on Tuesday October 06, 2020 @07:58AM (#24696772)
I guess the HN audience has voted. The result is: hacking around Excel stupidities is itself a stupid idea.

If you want Excel to understand your output, perhaps use a library which can write xlsx files.

[ Parent | on HN ]