text in a cell may be surrounded by quotation character ("), to note the start and end of a cell (a particular column and row location) in a table. quotation characters in a cell value in turn can be denoted by doubling the quotation character (""). this is primarily used to signify that a particular cell contains data that may be confusing to a computer that's trying to read the file. a common example of this is when a cell contains a comma as part of it's data. without the quotation marks, it's unclear if the comma denotes a separation between cells: