Chris Dean’s Personal Website

Well it’s the end of the day at work and after 8 hours of picking csv spreadsheets to bits I find myself with nothing left to aside from looking out of the window into the night and waiting for a phone call from one of our partners – and as such I decided to be a little more productive and pend the last 15 minutes before I leave for my train writing a blog post.

So, what to write about? Well CSV’s I guess.

CSV’s, for those who don’t already know are basically plain text file containing data separated into fields by commas, and are one of the most simple forms of sending raw data in a structured way between users.

Now, because this is raw data (which can get bulky) and because this format is used by a great many people from web developers to scientists, you would expect that full support for these files would be quite wide ranging between programs designed to manipulate this kind of data – namely excel and other spreadsheets.

This is not quite the case, however.

While programs such as excel have quite good functionality for manipulating the data in the files, when you get above a certain file size they tend to error for some reason, which is really quite annoying as this is such basic functionality that you would expect them to be able to handle say 25 MB files.

That’s it no time to continue moaning about how stupid excel is, trains to catch, people to see, etc. byeeeeee…..