Could you clarify what you mean by can't produce a useful CSV file?

My understanding and experience is that Excel generally does a reliable CSV export. Here are the limitations and issues that I know about. It cannot successfully export structure that requires metadata which does not fit in CSV format. (Hardly Excel's fault.) Many people do not know how to parse CSV (split does not cut it, and the interface to Text::CSV makes it impossible to produce a reliable solution). (Again not Excel's fault.) And several years ago they had a bug where positive floating point numbers expressed in scientific notation were not recognizable as being numbers by most other spreadsheets (or Access IIRC). That was their fault, but has long been fixed. And Excel, like most Microsoft products, uses pre-emptive locking, which I find rather irritating and inconvenient. (Not to mention a source of significant trouble from time to time.)

Are there any other issues that I should be aware of?

In reply to Re (tilly) 6: csv output by tilly
in thread csv output by Anonymous Monk

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