4 Reasons To Use a Text Editor Instead of Excel for .CSV Files
Spreadsheets are great, but sometimes text editors are better
I love spreadsheets and I love data. But I don’t always love using Excel for .csv files. In fact, there are many times where I would much rather use a text editor instead (e.g., Excel can be really slow). To do this, right click on the file and click open with your application of choice. This is possible because the file format allows for different software to read its contents interchangeably.
A .csv or a comma-separated values file is a delimited text file that uses a comma to separate values. Each line of the file is a data record. This is much simpler than it sounds. Take a look at the example below.
I downloaded the iris flower dataset in .csv format and opened it using both Excel and a text editor. As you can see, it is the same data, but displayed in different ways. In Excel, you have the classic column and rows view. Whereas in the text editor, you also have the column (represented with commas) and rows (represented with each line) view.
