>The biggest and most thorny problem to solve is the people problem: how do you convince people to stop creating new CSVs when they’ve never done things any other way? Fortunately - for this problem, anyway - most of the world’s business data is born in one of a handful of programs that are owned by an increasingly small number of companies. If Microsoft and Salesforce were somehow convinced to move away from CSV support in Excel and Tableau, a large portion of business users would move to a successor format as a matter of course. Of course, it’s debatable whether that kind of a change is in the best interest of those companies, but I’m cautiously optimistic.
No, it's not. It's about replacing CSVs for exchanging data. It mentions that CSVs often are the product of someone exporting data from a spreadsheet or doing a table dump, and how just doing that tends to create a ton of problems, but Excel is an example, not the subject matter of the article.
> The business world will laugh at you and continue on their merry CSV way.
The business world pays me a lot of money to teach them not to use CSVs.
Could you teach them better and faster? I don't think they're getting it. You have my blessing to use violence.
I'm trying man. I'm trying.
-the first line is always a header
-fields are separated by Unit separator characters
-records are separated by Record separator characters
-encoding is UTF8
If you wanted to get fancy you could also have:
-comment lines
-column metadata (e.g. column 0 is an ISO date, column 2 is text, column 3 is an integer)
Both the above could start with a Unicode character unlikely to be used for anything else.
I think that would avoid 99% of the pain of CSV files. The downside is that the use of things like the Unit separator mean that it wouldn't be easy to create/edit manually.
I don't suppose it will ever happen though.
I mean, you'd have to be using a pretty terrible tool for it not being able to handle that, and I suspect if such an approach were to become prevalent, that tool would either fix the glitch or become largely unused.
But you gotta admit that excel is a pretty terrible tool to hand edit a CSV with... ;-)
...or you could invent abominations like CSV, TSV, etc. ;-)
I realize that this is a specific use case here, but I was on Cognos for years, and then when they started shifting over to Tableau, it wasn't any better.. csv, MS formats, proprietary formats, etc.