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There are different implementations of Comma Separated Values; two of them are Microsoft Excel and OpenOffice.

Is there any difference between these CSV implementations? For example both can open .csv extensions and both separate values with a comma. Are there any differences?

Tamara Wijsman
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Hammad
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4 Answers4

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There should not be any difference. It's kind of standard file format. See wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma-separated_values

Vasyl Boroviak
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They do support slightly different characters in the place of the comma, but these cases are very unusual in real life. This support is on the Import side. Both generate very standard CSV files, with commas for delimiters and quoted strings. The importer supports things like tab-delimited-files and files delimited with characters that aren't either tab or comma.

SysAdmin1138
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Note that "comma" is not the separator used in Europe, as the "," is the ISO standard for decimal separation. So CSVs are not really portable outside the US region. There was another SuperUser question on this

Community
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jakobengblom2
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There isnt' an "exact" difference. Both allow for some leighway in the format. You can specifiy your dellimiters, string closures, and whatnot in both programs.

CSV (Can be loaded in either):

3,2,'c',6
1,33,4,'h'

TSV (Tab-Seperated, works in the CSV Implementation):

1     3     5     7
7     "asd" 6     3

CSV really is simple enough, both programs can load a whole slew of variants.

If you really wanna see the differences in the DEFAULT approach, why dont you make sheets in both and save them as .csv ?

Aren B
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