this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2026
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Give me CSV or give me death
i will also accept LibreOffice's format for formula purposes
CSV does not allow storing formulas, just results. It is a good format to share data, but it is not a good format to store spreadsheets which very often contain such formulas.
Formulas are just strings, no reason you couldn't store over in a CSV.
Maybe your software doesn't want you to do that, but that's a problem with that specific software.
Do you know of any software which stores formulas in CSV?
It's an option when saving in LibreOffice Calc.
Would be a pretty straightforward macro to (un)quote the formulas in Excel or Google Sheets etc.
I didn't know calc could do that, cool!
you can store anything in CSV, it's just not always very practical ;)
Just like opening a .doc file in notepad, technically all the information is there
I don't think you can have spreadsheets with multiple "sub sheets" (can't think of an unambiguous name for them - basically the equivalent of browser tabs)
Pretty sure there's no way to have graphical charts either.
The technical term is sheet. The many sheets form a workbook (your file).
technically you could do both, it's just not practical at all :)
csv is a pretty good data sharing format, but not very well suited for spreadsheets. Just because you can shove anything you want in there doesn't mean you should.
I think it's perfectly well suited to spreadsheet. It's more-or-less perfect for tabular human-readable data. If you want to embed fancy things like OLE objecta and ActiveX controls and helpful animated characters then you may well be better served with another format.
Death it is, CSV is horrible effectively unstandardized trash that has led to uncountable hours of efforts wasted due to subtly corrupted data through incompatible serialization settings.
It actively makes the world a worse place by existing.
No, you