[trzeci]

I don't get it - why the world, Excel can't just open the CSV, assume from the extension it's COMMA separated value and do the rest. It does work slightly better when importing, just a little.

[boricj]

Your comma isn't my comma. French systems use the comma as a decimal point for numbers and we use semicolons to separate fields in CSV files.

[mort96]

No, french systems also use comma to separate fields in CSV files. Excel uses semicolon to separate fields in France, meaning it generates semicolon-separated files rather than comma-separated files.

It's not the fault of CSV that Excel changes which file format it uses based on locale.

[criddell]

Most of the people most of the time aren't importing data from a different locale. A good assumption for defaults could be that the CSV file honors the current Windows regional settings.

[TuringTest]

It could, but it doesn't want to. The whole MS Office dominance came into being by making sure other tools can't properly open documents created by MS tools; plus being able to open standard formats but creating small incompatibilities all around, so that you share the document in MS format instead.

[Qem]

Probably Microsoft treats a pure-text, simply specified, human-readable and editable spreadsheet format that fosters interoperability with competing software as an existential threat.