Difference Between Excel and CSV

Excel vs CSV

Ever since the advent of personal computers, it has been used to process paperwork. Ordinary documents like letters were stored in a plain text format which contained nothing more than a list of characters. Spreadsheets are a little bit more difficult because values are arranged in a tabular form. CSV (Comma Separated Value) was a file format devised to store tabular data. It uses commas to separate each entry in a row and the newline symbol to go to the next row. Excel is a more recent spreadsheet application from Microsoft and it saves the data with its own file format.

Excel is way more superior compared to CSV as it is able to do a lot more to the tabular data. Formatting is one of the biggest feature that comes with newer spreadsheet applications. You can change fonts, colors, and the sizes of each cell so that the table is much easier to read and more pleasant to the eyes of the readers. You also have the ability to embed tables within the Excel files that give a visual representation of the data. CSV has no provisions for saving table information in itself.

The advantage of CSV files comes from its age and its widespread compatibility. You can open a CSV file in almost any application, even on a text editor as the format itself is just a text file that uses special characters to determine where one cell ends and the other begins. Due to the advanced features that were added to excel and the greater amount of data stored that is not directly related to what is stored in each cell, saving in a delimited text file like CSV becomes tedious and impractical. Excel files follow its own algorithm in saving the data and are no longer readable in other application that do not recognize it.

Most people would find that Excel is quite sufficient for the majority of spreadsheet needs. There is really no need to use CSV unless you have some specialized application that is irreplaceable and does not recognize the data in an Excel file.

Summary:
1.Excel is a spreadsheet application that saves files into its own format while CSV is a standard of saving tabular information into a delimited text file
2.CSV is a very old method of saving tables compared to Excel
3.CSV files cannot store other information like formatting while this comes standard in Excel
4.Files saved in excel cannot be opened or edited by text editors while CSV files can

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