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CSV is hell. Some idiot somewhere decided that Comma Separated Values in certain locales should be based on semicolons (who would have thought files would be shared across country borders!?), so when we open CSV files that are actually comma separated all the information is in the first cell (until a semicolon appears).

To get comma separated CSVs to show properly in Excel we have to mess around with OS language settings. CSV as a format should have died years ago, it's a shame so many apps/services only export CSV files. Many developers (mainly US/UK based) are probably not aware of how much of a headache they inflict on people in other countries by using CSV files.




Actually you can change the extension from .csv (that Excel believes it can recognize) to something else and open it, the "import wizard" will let you choose the "separating character" and other settings that are very useful when importing Comma (or other character) separated values (such as forcing the "data type" by column). A good idea, however is to use TSV (TAB separated values) that can be usually copy pasted directly, it still remains in many cases the "feature" that Excel has to auto-identify data types, creating a mess with a number of pieces of data (such as a columen with Hex values, half of which will be "text" and the other half "numbers").




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