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Comment by maxerickson | Hacker News Reader

Excel is not particularly rewriting data cells in spreadsheets. When importing other formats, it has some automatic conversions that people apparently find convenient. It's a little bit pedantic, but a text file with some sort of structured format is not the same thing as a spreadsheet.

It probably doesn't make any sense to apply automatic conversions to formats that are more or less defined by convention, but if you mark a column in an Excel file as text, Excel won't apply magic to that column.

The bigger problem is that it is considered acceptable to not keep a record of the changes being made to the data (a script can serve nicely as both a data processor and a record of the processing being done).

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> if you mark a column in an Excel file as text, Excel won't apply magic to that column.

The problem is that the CSV file format has no reliable mechanism to mark a column as text( * ). Known workarounds include inserting a single quote at the beginning of a field, but this single quote may remain in the field forever, polluting the data downstream from the import.

* The obvious approach of enclosing CSV text fields in quotes, and non-text fields without quotes, won't work -- too many Excel versions strip out all the quotes while importing, without considering the implication of their selective application. Also, in many Excel versions "DEC1" is converted into a date whether or not it's quoted.

I posted this the last time there was a discussion about CSV and excel:

If you are generating the CSV yourself, save yourself some agony and just wrap the text in =""

    $ cat test.csv
    ="12.34567890124312341234123412341234",="1-5"
    $ open -a Microsoft\ Excel test.csv

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5514587

Explanation:

It uses another auto trick: if the leading character is '=', the result is treated as a formula.

Thus, you can actually write formulas in your CSV and excel will interpret appropriately:

    $ cat test.csv
    =1+1,="1-5"
    $ open -a Microsoft\ Excel test.csv

You should see the value '2' (with content `=1+1`)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5514704

An alternative solution that works is some situations is to format the column as "Text". However you must do this before pasting the data into the cells or else it will already be converted. I use this technique for zip codes which can have leading zeros.

"The problem is that the CSV file format has no reliable mechanism to mark a column as text( )."*

The problem is that there is NO such thing a "the CSV file format". There's only a lot of different interpretations of how to store data in forms of rows with fields separated by commas or semicolons or whatnot, with every software package having slightly different ideas.

Save the world, use S-expressions or JSON if you write something new.

CSV is not the issue here; Excel's automagic conversions are. If it could open JSON, it'd extract the values, then apply it's magic. So your JSON string "DEC1" would still be converted (JSON doesn't have a date type).

The point of my comment was mainly that "by rewriting data cells in spreadsheets" is a poor way to describe the bad import behavior of Excel. A CSV is an ill specified structured text file, not a spreadsheet (most spreadsheets have some sort of type information for each cell, who knows whether it is intentional and accurate and so forth, but it is there).

In that context, "in an Excel file" meant "in a native Excel file".

> most spreadsheets have some sort of type information for each cell ...

Yes, but the problem is that, without some knowledge and care on the part of the operator, the data type will be established during the import, not in advance, and on a cell-by-cell basis.

I am surprised that this is a surprise. Anyone who has used Excel to open a CSV file of any complexity has surely encountered incorrect, automatic "interpretations" of values as dates or numbers.

Why wouldn't an import tool have an option "make automated conversions" or the ability to _simply_ turn automated conversions off with clear state feedback (eg as a checkable button like for overwrite/insert modes¹).

Surely MS research has shown that this is one of the great pain points with Excel/Word?

[¹ I haven't used MS Word for real in over a decade, it used to have a display of OVR in a bottom panel IIRC for when overwrite mode was on.]

> Surely MS research has shown that this is one of the great pain points with Excel/Word?

Perhaps, but Microsoft is infamous for ignoring Excel's many faults. An article linked yesterday described a litany of very serious statistical errors of long standing, without any indication of a timetable to repair the defects.

Yeah, that. Excel's CSV behavior is worse-than-useless, which is a shame since CSV is generally treated as the easiest way to get data into Excel.

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