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Comment by Grollicus | Hacker News Reader

Is Microsoft somehow on board for this? In my experience there are CSV files and there are CSV files that excel understands and as long as you don't get your file format into excel that will seriously hinder adoption.

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In my experience excel doesn't even understand its own csv files. If you save one using the Swedish locale it uses semicolons as field separators since comma is used as decimal points. Trying to open the resulting file using a English locale results in garbage.

When saving as CSV, Excel will use the regional "List separator" setting. You can override this in Windows 7 with Region and Language > Additional Settings > List separator.

If you are trying to generate a file that plays nice with Excel, there is a way to force a specific delimiter with the "sep" pragma:

    sep=|
    a|b|c
    1|2|3

Please give up on that and make csv itself nice and simple. :) Let's have it err comma separated.

Simple is good.

If it's really simple even Microsoft will be able to implement it.

Would that work if you try to use the ascii record separator character with the sep pragma?

Just open it in Libreoffice and save it to .xlsx. It's the only way I've found that actually works reliably.

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