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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...

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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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