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"When they export their data as CSV, they’ll probably just bring it into Excel first to have a look around."

If the first thing the the user is doing is bringing the file into excel and you don't need multiple tables per file what is the difference to the end user other than the file having a csv instead of a xls or xlsx file extension?

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its right there in the article: Dates, times, and durations; Percentages; Number formatting

the number of times i've opened a csv to find that excel has tried to determine the dates, and decided that the year thats being referred to is 1914 instead of 2014...

I've never had an issue like you describe with dates before. I've always output them in the csv in Y-m-d format and that has worked as expected.

I should have been more precise and said if your data isn't using the set of features described in the article there isn't a big difference. Not all data has dates, time durations, percentages, and number formatting.

But you could get all those benefits by just testing your csv loads OK into excel.

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