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It is just so fun when you have @ as a lead character for fields. You can do DATA-IMPORT from CSV and it is fine but if you just double click load a CSV from explorer it tries to interpret the data as a formula and randomly loses the @

I have not check myself the full list of special characters that cannot be loaded CSV style from Explorer but one should expect consistency with DATA-IMPORT functionality



Two more examples.

In a CSV with zip codes, Excel drops the leading zero: Boston, 02114.

A CSV with text ranges: 1-10, 11-20, 21-30... becomes 10-Jan and 20-Nov!


That's because CSV is an untyped data format.

Why don't people use the import options available to them? You can select the precise data type of each column if you know the format anyway.

While the default choices that Excel makes are questionable at times, they're both known and can easily be overridden.




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