[JimmyAustin]

A lot of analysis is done using CSVs being pushed in and out of Excel. Doing so strips the formatting. Please understand the workflows being crying “skill issue”.

[mike_hearn]

You can write CSVs in such a way that forces Excel to infer specific data types:

"=""Data Here"""

will always be treated as a string. This is also supported by Sheets, apparently.

[mcintyre1994]

TIL, neat! Does Excel automatically export like that if you format the columns as strings?

[_visgean]

ok but will that work other tools that work with those csvs? I imagine that they export / import from excel to csv for a reason.

[bayindirh]

Yes, but you can create a small macro to the change the formatting and assign that to your table. Your CSV should import deterministically. That's not impossible to do.

I saw a complete analysis engine written as an Excel file, which accepts and exports CSVs cleanly. It can be done.

[tssva]

You don’t even need to write a macro. Excel’s Import Text Wizard will allow you to assign data type to each column at the time of import.

[n4r9]

"It can be done" is a far cry from "it's reasonable to expect scientists to do this".

[knighthack]

Sorry, can't understand, and that excuse is unacceptable. It's totally a skill issue, and a failure of it, and a laziness of these 'scientists'.

You'd expect scientists - people working to understand the nature of reality - to have some base competency about how they measure reality. Could have at least used a database for things like this; moreover any decent database can often import from CSV and export to CSV as well. Excel is not at fault here; the 'scientists' are.

[eigenket]

Haha, you think scientists have control over what software their employer buys for them to work on.

There are probably wonderful places where that is the case, and probably several of those places use something like libreoffice which doesn't do the idiotic data conversions excel does, but they are definitely not the norm.

[cqqxo4zV46cp]

Coming up next: people should still use C because writing insecure code is a “skill issue”.

Why can’t we as a society make ANYTHING easier without the usual blathering on from the peanut gallery turning it into a question of one’s intelligence?