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Comment by imtringued | Hacker News Reader

With what software? LibreOffice? Excel doesn't support opening CSV files with a double click. It lets you import CSV files into a spreadsheet, but that requires reading unreasonably complicated instructions.

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On windows, csv's automatically open in Excel through the file explorer. Almost all normal businesses use windows so the OPs claim is pretty reasonable.

Depends on the country/locale - I just generate them with semicolons to enable easy opening

We're discussing CSVs. You are discussing SemicolonSVs.

I do wish SCSV was thing

> Excel doesn't support opening CSV files with a double click

Yes, it does. When Excel is installed, it installs a file type association for CSV and Explorer sets Excel as the default handler.

Excel absolutely can open csv files with a double click if you associate the file type extension.

You should never blindly trust Excel when using CSV files. Try this csv file:

    COL1,COL2,COL3 
    5,"+A2&C1","+A2*8&B1"

True, but not the point here. "You can" and "You should as a general rule" are not the same.

Hesitant to actually try to open this, what does it do?

How is that not opening?

You are creating a new spreadsheet that you can save as an xlsx. What you are looking at is not the CSV file itself.

This is a distinction that does not matter to most non-technical people.

You are missing the point so hard its hilarious.

Well I mean unless you're inspecting it with a hex editor, you're not looking at the csv file itself. Even then, I suppose you could say that's not even the file itself. An electron microscope perhaps? But then you've got the whole Heisenberg issue, so there's that.

That's not true either, try it yourself with a simple csv file, open it, add a row and save - you'll see the original update

(there are some limitations)

Those programs support opening csv with double click

What are you talking about? Excel opens csv with zero issue. In windows, and mac. Mac you right click and "open with". Or you open excel, and click file/open and find the csv. I do the first one a dozen times a day.

Only if the Windows Regional Settings List Separators happens to be "comma", which is not the case in most of Europe (even in regions that use the decimal point) so only CSV files with SEP=, as the first line work reliably with Excel.

Literally did this all day today. Took a csv file, parsed it in elixir, processed it and created a new csv file, then opened that in excel, to confirm the changes. At least 100 times today.

This, plus the parser in Excel gets thrown off by some multiline edge cases very easily. Also, the file has to be UTF-8-BOM, not just UTF-8.

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