Downloading and using .csv files

"csv" stands for "comma separated values". A .csv file is basically a text file that contains rows of values separated by commas.

The advantages of a .csv file are its simplicity and portability. Nearly all spreadsheet and statistical packages are capable of reading a .csv file and correctly interpreting its contents. Most of them will also write a .csv file, so it provides an easy way of transferring data between software packages that normally might not be able to read each others files.

A disadvantage of the .csv format is that it does not support all of the bells and whistles in terms of nice formatting, embedding objects, and so on that are available in the native format of most products.

If you want to download a .csv file and open it with Microsoft Excel, there seem to be two potential difficulties:

• When you select a link to a .csv file in the Safari browser, it will treat it as text and display it. You can then save it, but the default is to add a .txt extension, producing something like assignment1.csv.txt. If you subsequently open this with Excel, it is likely that everything will be in one column because it is no longer recognized as a .csv file.
• If you override the default .txt extension, the Macintosh version of Excel apparently does not recognize .csv as an eligible extension. When you go to open it, it will be grayed out, or will not show at all in the dialog box. You have to explicitly specify that all files are eligible to be opened.

If you can circumvent these two difficulties, you should be able to properly open a .csv file in the Macintosh version of Excel.

Step by Step Instructions for Downloading a .csv file

Suppose a web page has a link to a file named assignment1.csv:

When you click on the link, Safari will open the file and display the contents. You should see lines with comma separated values:

You can select save as and get a dialog box like the following. However, note that .txt has been appended to the filename, which is the default behavior:

Move the cursor to the filename, erase the .txt extension, and press save:

Safari desparately wants to append .txt to the filename, so it will ask one last time with a dialog box set up so the defalut is to append .txt. Since we want to avoid this, click Don't append:

Now you can start Excel, which should open with an empty spreasheet:

When you ask to open a file, the following dialog box appears:

Note that Enable: defaults to All Readable Documents and that assignment1.csv is grayed out (i.e., not selectable)

For some strange reason, .csv files are excluded when you select "All Readable Documents", even though they are perfectly readable.

Click on the up/down arrows at the right of the Enable: box, and select All Documents. Notice that assignment1.csv is no longer grayed out.

When you click on its name, assignment1.csv is highlighted and its format is recognized (despite the fact that originally it was not included in "All Readable Documents").

Now you can click Open and the data will import correctly into Excel: