Time to retire the CSV?
I don&#x27;t agree with giving up csvs until the following conditions are met:<p>1) A truly open format is available and accessible. Csvs are textfiles. There is no system around that cannot open a textfile. If the format is binary or requires patents or whatever, then it&#x27;s a non-starter.<p>2) Applications have a speed increase from using csvs. To wit, I loved csvs because often they finish preparing much faster than a &quot;formatted&quot; output in excel, etc. and sometimes I just want to see the numbers, not have everything colored or weird features like merged cells in excel, etc.<p>3) The new format should not be grossly larger than the one it is replacing. Extracts in Excel format are orders of a magnitude larger than csv in filesize. This affects run-time to prepare the extract, open it (memory constraints, etc.)<p>Is there truly a problem? The author is not forced to use csvs.