It's both of their faults. CSV is not blameless here - Excel is doing something broadly that users expect, have dates as dates and numbers as numbers. Not everything as strings. If CSV had types then Excel would not have to guess what they are.
It does have types if you define them in the schema. Not every format needs to be self-describing. It's often more efficient to share the schema once outside of the data feed than have the overhead of restating it for every data point.
It's completely Excel's fault for pushing their type-inference and making it difficult for users to define or supply their own.
Power Query does a better job handling it, but you should be able to just supply a schema on import, like you can with Polars or DuckDb.
It's another example of MS babying their userbase too much. Like how VBA is single threaded only because threads are hard. They're making their product less usable and making it harder for their users to learn how stuff works.
Csv doesn’t have a schema, it has a barely adhered to post-hoc “not a specification” and everything is strings.
That you can solve some of these problems by using something as well as the csv file is not anywhere near as helpful, and it’s a clear problem of csv files. There is no universally followed schema, for a start, so now we’re at unique solutions all over the place.
> It's often more efficient to share the schema once outside of the data feed than have the overhead of restating it for every data point.
You cannot be suggesting that csv files are efficient surely, they’re atrociously inefficient. Having the same format and a tied in schema would solve a lot and add barely anything as overhead. If you want efficiency, do not use csv.
Asking users to manually load in the right schema every time they open a file is asking for trouble. Why wouldn’t you combine them?
> It's completely Excel's fault for pushing their type-inference and making it difficult for users to define or supply their own.
It’s not entirely excels fault that csv doesn’t have types. They didn’t invent and promote a new standard, but then why would you? There’s better formats out there. I’m sure they would argue that the excel files are a better format for a start.
And people did make better formats. That’s why I think csv should be consigned to the bin of history.
