Guides
Everything we know about wrangling CSV and Excel files, written for humans — honest about trade-offs, dated where facts can age, and linked to how the tool actually works throughout.
Comma, semicolon, tab: the CSV delimiter mess, explained
Why your “CSV” uses semicolons, why Excel opens files as one giant column, what RFC 4180 actually says, and how to fix delimiter problems for good.
CSV to JSON: structures, types, and the gotchas that bite
Array of objects or NDJSON? Should “007” become 7? How CSV’s untyped rows map to JSON, where conversions go wrong, and rules that keep data intact.
CSV too big for Excel: what actually works
Excel stops at 1,048,576 rows. Here’s every realistic way to open a bigger CSV — Power Query, browsers, databases, editors — with honest trade-offs.
CSV vs Excel: which format to use, and what each one silently drops
CSV and .xlsx solve different problems. What each preserves, what each destroys, when to use which, and how to convert without losing data.
How Excel silently mangles CSV files (and how to stop it)
Leading zeros vanish, product codes become dates, long IDs get rounded. Excel changes CSV data on open — here’s the full damage list and the workarounds.
Removing duplicates from a CSV without losing real data
Deduplicating is deciding what “the same” means. A practical method: key columns, whitespace and case traps, keep-first vs keep-latest, verification.