Different spreadsheet output on French locale

[RavensFan]

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@altenbach wrote:

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@RavensFan wrote:

MICROSOFT YOU IDIOTS.  CSV=COMMA SEPARATED VALUE.  RECOGNIZE THE COMMA AS A SEPARATOR!

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Well, in countries with comma as decimal seperator, a comma will not work as field separator. There is no good standard, but as Matt said, using a semicolon as field delimiter sometimes works. (see also this disucssion)

Instead of using csv files, I would recommend to use the default tab delimiter and save the file as *.txt. Excel will have no problem opening it.

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True,  but that is a problem with using CSV files in those countries.  You can't use a value separator that also is the same character as your decimal separator.

The problem is once you accept the terminology that CSV stands for "comma separated values", and Microsoft understands that CSV extensions mean comma separated values enough to be able to open it as a text file, yet Microsoft doesn't pay attention to that when importing the text file.  And I have yet to find a setting in Excel that let's you define a comma as a default setting to separate values when importing CSV files which would work fine for those of us in the US, or other English-speaking, or other non-European countries.

For countries that use commas as decimal separators, then they should not be using CSV files or even giving them the extension of CSV.

[dan190]

This worked.

On my other (originally English) laptop, commas worked fine.

On this (French, then English converted) laptop, semicolon works. Comma doesnt work. Tried many things. Q_Q

Thanks all

[ben64]

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@dan190 wrote:

This worked.

On my other (originally English) laptop, commas worked fine.

On this (French, then English converted) laptop, semicolon works. Comma doesnt work. Tried many things. Q_Q

Thanks all

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This is one of the reasons I had the english versions of Windows 7 and MS Office installed. My collegues with the french versions have the same issue, they have to use Text to Columns under the Data menu or as also said use semicolon as separator. Altenbach solution is also interesting but the user still has to right-clic and select open with Excel. I agree with Raven's Fan that when you use the .csv extension Excel should use the comma in the file as separator.

Ben64

[altenbach]

Excel is relatively forgiving and will try to open anything as long as the file has an extension that is configured to be opened by excel. What you often see here in the forum is that users write a tab delimited text file, but give it an *.xls extension. This works fine.

The main problem with that is that some users think that it acutally IS an excel file, which it isn't. So if they would open it in excel and then save it as a real excel file, they would not be able to open it in LabVIEW later (at least not in the expected way)..