Programmers love to complain about Excel, but we happily use YAML, which has essentially the same footgun: certain strings (like 'on') need quoting if you don't want it to interpret them as something else.
1. Potentially shoot yourself in the foot with tons of extra whitespace. 2. Unreadable mess.
TOML is better. You can choose whitespace if you want, but you can always go back to dot notation. Though I (sadly) agree JSON is better than YAML. One of the few times I've changed my mind from A to B and then back to A in tech.
Also, the main problem is that excel changes your input instead of just misinterpreting it. The difference being, the original will be gone.
That's a feature though. Coincidentally it only happens when you paste the data or if you messed up the generation of the file (didn't escape the column you want to leave untouched).
To me it seems like a case of you're holding it wrong. (which I don't wholeheartedly support)
In Apache POI HSSF/XSSF (Java Excel API), the HSSF actually stands for "Horrible Spreadsheet Format".
As a fun example, note that we need isSheetHidden() and isSheetVeryHidden() functions. (http://poi.apache.org/apidocs/4.1/org/apache/poi/ss/usermode...)
Don't include me in that group.