- Excel cannot guess the encoding of the file, and relies on the user selecting it from a list that has maybe a hundred values (?!); the most common encoding, UTF-8, is neither at the top or at the bottom of that list, but somewhere near the end, and is called "65001 : Unicode (UTF-8)" (the preceding value is "65000 : Unicode (UTF-7)"). There is little chance non-technical users will get this right the first time, or any time thereafter, and the result is files that are circulated with garbled encoding and wrong values.
- Excel cannot guess the separators either! (How hard can it be?)
That's probably the reason why one cannot "open" a CSV file directly in Excel and having it displayed properly; one has to go through the whole "import" process. Yet Windows insists all CSVs should automatically open in Excel.
Yes, it's a minor thing, but it should be so easy to fix; instead of that, recent versions of Office have brought incredibly annoying animations that take 2-3 screens to disable.