Something people do not understand is that type information in CSV files is conveyed out of band. The application that is reading the CSV file must know the datatype which effectively turns each CSV file into an application specific format.

Thanks for writing that! I don't think I've seen the reason for my (partial) dislike of CSV put into words that clearly before.

Its easy to say its people being dumb, but at this point I really wish excel just wasn't so confident in itself and actually asked you during the default open operation what you want to do.

Any change to Excel's 'open a worksheet' logic would break so many workflows it's just not funny anymore. I'm not kidding if I say I suspect it would significantly impact several countries' GDP for a while.

Even the (sometimes comically inadequate) heuristics that Excel uses to auto-determine field types can't be updated, for very similar reasons. Backwards-compatibility is... interesting...

My preferred work flow would be to open the csv, change some formatting, then reinterpret the original data.

It would require keeping two sets of data for each cell, but that seems to already be the case since F2-enter on each cell would accomplish exactly that. Last I tried.

I wonder what is the ratio of people dealing with dates versus genes is... Probably very substantial on favour to those who deal with dates. So things just to work for them is likely better option.