Comment by withinboredom
1 day ago
I assume most Americans don't run into the CSV hell that other countries do. In my current country, whether CSVs open as a comma-separated or semi-colon seperated document depends on whether the OS is set to use a , or a . for decimal numbers. It's absolutely annoying.
Right but the import wizard can fix things. They just don't make the double-click go through the import wizard - and people use 'open' or double-click their files. LibreOffice Calc opens the import wizard when you open a csv and it's fine.
For the life of me I cannot comprehend why they cannot let us choose the decimal separator independently from the locale. Or for fuck’s sake, just be smart about it. My desktop is for boring administrative tasks, of course I want it in my language. No, I don’t want to manually change settings in Word for every fucking document I create because ~none of them will be in English. But then why do I have to search-and-replace . with , or click 12 times through an inane bullshit wizard just to paste some data in Excel?
Respecting regional settings is so inconsistent among Office applications. The desktop ones usually get it, but online is a crapshoot. Whenever there's a date like 3/4/25 I get the play the fun guessing game of whether that's March or April.
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.
Americans don't use CSV?
Depending on whether your OS uses a , or a . for decimal numbers changes how excel will parse a CSV file. Americans use a . for decimal numbers, so it will parse it as a CSV. Other countries use a , for decimal numbers, so it will parse it as a SSV (semi-colon separated) and everything will be in a single column.
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.
Excel's behaviour is almost as annoying. It's basically impossible to produce a correctly-formatted German document on an English OS and vice-versa.
this seems like less of an excel problem and more of an issue with an improperly escaped data set though?
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I don't know any of these problems. I use a modern operating system and office suite that supports CSV not a specific subset and syntax of it.
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