Debatable. Excel can't even open CSV files properly. You need to run the import wizard. But loads of people don't do this. They see a file on their desktop and double click it. Why can't double clicking a CSV file just open the import wizard!? (Because they want people to share xlsx files as a data format.)
For Project Online, the most reliable way I found to fix it was to manually edit the URL to replace en-US with en-AU, then bookmark that.
To make matters worse, randomly, employees will have their OS using US or GB locales so that if you distribute a CSV, it will work for some employees, but not for others.
Open control-panel for regional settings, select "Advanced settings" button on the bottom control.exe intl.cpl
If you don't know any of these problems, then all the people and systems you work with have a "." as decimal and "," as separator, and you are spared from the hell of MS Office being unable to overrule these OS-settings when treating a CSV
Thing is, it is not about what you used, you are not able to control this from happening when your CSV should work for people in other countries. Whatever configuration you used which never got a complain, if your recipients also used Excel to work with those documents, they probably have the same regional setting on Windows for list/thousands/decimal separator.
If you use ";" as separator, i.e. Excel in UK, US, Japan, China, Korea will not be able to correctly open your CSV.
But even better: If you created this CSV on a France or Sweden regional setting, the thousands separator will be a whitespace ("1 000" instead "1,000" or "1.000"), so Excel in e.g. Italy will not detect those properly.
> I am surprised this is problem enough (in 2025) that people emotionally discuss it.
It is a (intentional) weakness of MS Office for those who work in an international environment, because Excel links itself to .csv files to hinder the experience, as it is neither able to properly detect them nor guide their users through a process to properly handle them.
1.01, "hi", CSV has problems, "1.01"
1,01, "hi", Yes it really does, "1,01"
Your operating system cannot solve this problem.
It's not about people, it's about the Windows locale setting and how MS Excel interprets a CSV-file when you doubleclick it
Also, CSVs seem to open just fine on my Excel. If it's not formatted with a standard delimiter or isn't handing quoted strings the proper way, sure maybe the data wizard is needed.
Excel is terrible in a lot of aspects, but CSVs seem to be something it handles as well as anything else in my experience.
Ofc you do. In practice, a CSV file can decide to use `|` for comma, and `<>` instead of quotes.
> In practice, a CSV file can decide to use `|` for comma, and `<>` instead of quotes.
Ofc it is. Now try to edit that CSV with Excel and save it again in that format.
It is the single biggest blocked against open computing.
If Microsoft were serious about open source like another poster claimed, they would let us run it on all platforms.
Excel at this point is specialist software, like adobe photoshop. Everything else is 'good enough'.
Seems to me Microsoft office is still the dominant player.
That being said, excel itself is still more powerful than google sheets, but the collaborative nature of Gsuite beats the pants off of MS Office, online or native.
My last decade has been a mix, some o365, some GDocs. I do wish there was something opened that was nearly as good as Visio myself, rather than renting it as an add-on. diagrams.net/draw.io is pretty good for some things, but Visio has a lot of features that aren't even close. I haven't tried the web version of Visio lately, last I had it was only halfway decent for read-only, but apparently most features now work. So next time I need it in mac/linux it should be an option.
I reinstalled Wordpad. Wordpad is sufficient for most things (including opening and editing most simple word documents--though that may be because I created them myself with office 2007) and if I really need a word processor (styles, page layout, etc) then I also have LibreOffice. I didn't even consider an Office license when I rebuilt last.
FWIW Docs isn't bad, and slides is... useable, but sheets is a poor excel alternative.
- if you have GMail, people(esp engineering) use docs and 1-n people have Excel on top
- if you are all in on MS, then of course no one will use GDocs
Some wounds are self-inflicted, and open source has a well-known last-20%-polish problem that's especially painful in mass-user scenarios like office software.
OOo wasting the 00s with a circa-90s UI (and Oracle being assholes) is equally responsible for MS Office's continued popularity in enterprise.
Personally I prefer 90s software design over the bloated crap of today.
I'd argue the opposite: Powerpoint makes literacy decline.
"PowerPoint makes us stupid." – General James N. Mattis, USMC [source: https://paulgraham.com/quo.html ]
Cognitive Style of Powerpoint - Edward Tufte
http://makingdatatalk.com/Lecture01/Reading/Tufte-TheCogniti...
Yes, Excel is probably a lot better if you use English setup and advanced functions.
For me,
- not having to use Norwegian for formulas (my work machine has Norwegian setup and Excel insists on using Norwegian formulas)
and
- not having it trying to find something it can misinterpret as a date, preferably some random place in a list of thousands of items
makes it worth it.
Will write a user story for that if you share the link /s
Also, why shouldn’t I be able to choose which language I use in Excel when they’re clearly all available?
Why do software companies these days insist on treating me as though I can’t look after myself?
It's perhaps the single worst database in the world; with no type control, no relationship management, no data safety whatsoever to speak of (it even actively mangles your data), its interface is utter madness, and yet - it's the most used database in the world.
It's perhaps the single worst development and runtime environment in the world, obscuring code, making reasoning about code and relations between code almost impossible, using a very obscure macro language that even morphs between different computers, and yet - it's the most used development and runtime environment in the world.
It's perhaps the single worst protocol/data exchange format in the world, with dozens of intentionally obscure, undocumented versions, insane format with surprising limitation (did I mention it actively mangles your data? - it's worth repeating anyway), supremely inefficient, and yet - it's the most used protocol/data exchange format in the world.
I can't really think of anything in the computing world that has done as much damage as Excel.
Excel allows norm(al users)ies to scale Mt Impossible from the bottom where they don't care about types, or relationships, and don't want to (because it's too abstract). They want to solve a problem. So they start with simple data given meaning by physical space, and work up from there.
It's genius. It's computing for people that will never care about pointers.
That's a bingo, although I'd phrase it even more glowingly as "It allows people to solve many common problems with computing, without knowing about pointers."
It's the lowest-barrier programmable logic, a coordinate-system where arithmetic can be applied to contents of any given coordinates.
And it likely would have grown into the same exact mess as Excel, with continuous expansion of the arithmetic part, as people kept reaching the limits of it but wouldn't go back and recreate everything in a DB...
My starting point would be that in their absence, a lot of problems wouldn't have been solved with computers, for want of programmers.
IBM buying Lotus and not Word Perfect was probably a mistake, had they really wanted to take it seriously... but they seemed more interested in Lotus Notes (think Outlook+Access in a self-hosted cloud environment), it was imho nasty af.
What frustrates me the most about this is I've seen some insane excel wizardry from the accounting department at various jobs over the years that is effectively programming, and that if these people had put just as much effort into learning Python & using a database, they'd be better off and might actually make good developers. In my view, Excel ends up becoming sort of an artificial barrier to departments outside of IT being able to make business software.
Doing something as "simple" as a LEFT JOIN of data requires having two separate documents (or one, but saved on your system), open them in the Power Query editor (if it's the same document you do it twice, once per table) which creates two "queries", and then you can either use one to join against the other, or create a third one "joining" them. In the end, you get three new sheets on your docs: the original tables and the merged one.
Then there's the annoyances: if you use Excel in English (US at least), apparently you get a CSV separated by actual commas "," (ASCII 0x2C) but using it in Spanish (Spain) you get it separated by semicolons ";" because commas actually separate number decimals. Meaning whenever I build a program that parses/writes CSV, I need to consider the chance it's using semicolons and commas instead of commas and dots. Not that it's non-standard: CSV doesn't specify a delimiter, but you could stick to the same format everywhere, or give an option to customise, or create "Tab-Separated Values" (essentially CSV with tabs separating values).
Another one is formulae, that also change based on language, and their arguments separator also changes. In en_US you'd use `=SUBTOTAL(109,B2:B7)` while in Spanish it's `=SUBTOTALES(109;B2:B97` (plural instead of singular, and semicolon instead of comma). Meaning any guide, documentation or tutorial in English requires me having to "guess" how the function is translated, and manually changing commas to semicolons.
With all this, I mean to say: Excel isn't even that great for the "normal" user. Or perhaps I'm too "power user" for this and just lazy enough to bother with it instead of using "proper" tools like Python or R.
UTF-8 is now pretty much the defacto standard for the files, where as historically you'd have a number of different code pages, and/or UTF-16 (BE/LE with or without BOM) and a lot of other variances that were much harder to deal with.
Pretty much any software library for CSV handles these things for you. As for localization of input/language parameters, can't really speak to that aspect of things. And I'm not generally using multiple spreadsheets, etc... at most I'll have a database source connected to work against queried data.
Nonetheless i hear your argument. I feel that python is the same abomination of the programming world. Yet it flourishes and is even loved.
Haveth we stockholm syndrome to our own garbage tools?
The victors truly get to write history, don't they?