Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Excel and CSV files

Have you ever tried to open a comma delimited .csv file in MS Excel and gotten these dialogs?

ExcelCSV

ExcelCSV2

There might actually be nothing wrong with your file.  If the first item happens to be ID (case sensitive), you will get this dialog in Excel (I’ve had this happen to me in 2003 and 2007).  If you don’t want this dialog to keep coming up, you’ll have to rename the first item or just change the casing of ID to id, Id, or iD.