The Dojo is the official blog of the marketing software company TraceWorks.

Fun with Excel

Jimmi Bram Nielsen Nov 16th

We have in conjunction with debugging our export to CSV functionality found an error in Excel.

This can best be illustrated by creating a small test CSV like this:

ExcelTest1.png

When opening this in Excel, we get a beautiful representation like this:

ExcelTest3.png

All is good, life is lovely. Until you decide to rename the first column from MyID to just ID:

ExcelTest2.png

Then Excel gets nasty, and starts yelling at you:
CSV in Excel

There are two ways to get around this Excel error, either you just don’t call your first column ID, or you save the CSV as UTF-8 instead of ANSI, but then you might have some problems with correct encoding of local characters. Good going Microsoft.

If you enjoyed this post, get free updates by email or RSS.

2 Responses to “Fun with Excel”

  1. Torben Rohde  November 18th

    We identified the very same issue in the Office 2000 version of Excel, so it doesn’t seem to be a big issue in the eyes of the Office dev team :-/
    (your screenshot looks like a newer version - or maybe its just the Vista chrome)

  2. Pelle  November 19th

    This is taken from the newest version of Excel - Office 2007. We’ll just wait until Office 2025.

Leave a Reply