OpenOffice's spreadsheet program treats spaces as separators; Microsoft's Excel doesn't. I'm used to space-including entries in a CSV being quoted; I suspect OpenOffice is too. I couldn't find a spec.

RFC-4180

When I generate CSV data I always double-quote each column even though it is optional. That seems to work well for OpenOffice and Excel (at least those who use excel do not complain, at least about the column data).

I often see people use "CSV" to refer to space separated fields and tab separated fields, and the wording of your question suggests that this might also apply to your case. I am not aware of a spec for space or tab separated field data format, and comma separated values, CSV, literally means that a comma is used as the separator. Using a comma as the separator according to RFC-4180 works well as an interchange format across all spreadsheets in my experience.

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Thanks. That has the information I want, including and the observation that Excel uses no double quotes.

Even numerics?

I downloaded a spreadsheet from Fidelity in CSV (their designation) format. I don't have Excel so used Open Office. Fidelity told me they thought the spreadsheet looked fine when I complained, so I went to the library to open it in Excel - thus I figured out the problem with spaces.

I use sc; I wrote a utility to convert CSV to SC and vice-versa. My first attempt relied on comma separators but that didn't work in Open Office, so I tested every field for alphas and quoted them, which doesn't work for all-digit strings. Quoting all strings would be a good standard - too bad CSV has no spec.

Note Excel can't include a comma in a field.

You are welcome, glad it helped!

Yes, even numerics. I regularly export from a MySQL database to CSV format for a few remote users, and have written a few functions based on RFC-4180 just for that purpose. That is why I have it fresh in mind that I double-quote everything. That said, I do recall in the dim past that we had to explore a few Excel options to keep it from mangling the imported data. For example, I recall that we had to set some import option to prevent removal of leading zeros from zip code fields, among a few other things, but we found solutions online easily enough.

I do not run any M$ systems so have no way to test with Excel locally. I have OO but honestly rarely use it, although I know that I have in past imported these same CSV files without problems.

(Note: I normally use sc myself when I need a spreadsheet, great little application! But I find I don't use spreadsheets much any more!)

Good luck!

My recollection is that Excel suffixes a space-delimited file with .prn; tab delimited files are .txt