Hacker News Reader

Comment by jdc0589 | Hacker News Reader

I've had better luck with the azure twitter account than premier support.

Maybe I've just had bad luck, but in my (moderately limited) experience, premier support == guaranteed indian call center so they can meet the higher SLAs.

Actual conversation with premier support:

me: hey, it looks like the format of the billing report CSVs changed without any documentation or versioning. Can you confirm? Also, it looks like the line endings are now randomly intermixed between windows and linux style. Whats up with that?

support: STOP OPENING THE CSVs IN EXCEL, IT CAN CORRUPT FORMATTING.

me: good call, let me remove excel from our usage monitoring automation pipeline......sike..

Aside: I am convinced that EA billing/usage reports are manually generated via Mechanical Turk.

View on HN

Excel's handling of CSV's pisses me off. It will modify the actual file when you open it, even if you don't save.

The entire office suite is horrible when it comes to preserving user data though. Access will change sql queries if you look at the code and close the query without saving or modifying anything. It's especially annoying when the query no longer works because Access 'helpfully' removed some parenthesis.

Do you know if LibreOffice modifies csv files in this manner, or is it 'safe' ?

I've never had it modify an opened file without me explicitly saving it.

What happens if you mark the file read-only?

I've never had that happen and I open a lot of CSVs in Excel.

I don't think excel will change the file if you dont save.

But, weirdly excels CSV issues are a more mac-specific program. MSFT insists that mac has a different format for csvs and will constantly destroy csvs, change formatting, unquote fields, merge columns together, insert random unicode characters, screwed up line endings, etc if you save on mac and aren't careful.

I've actually noticed msft has changed the default csv output format in excel mac twice over the past month (including making the csv default format be TSV??) which is pretty ridiculous.

I just want them to comma seperate, quote fields if necessary, and properly escape characters. Don't insert random characters or fuck with encodings. How hard could it be?

> MSFT insists that mac has a different format for csvs

Mac had a different format for CSVs, and actually Excel started its life as a Mac product.

I just write a simple custom program to deal with my CSV's :-)

I don't doubt it, but the bit about excel was sarcasm, it doesn't exist in our workflow.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com