Just a quick post to share a tip I discovered this morning. I was generating a CSV file and for some reason when I went to open it in Excel, I got a message saying the file’s extension was CSV, but the file format was SYLK. Clicking through a couple message boxes opened the file up just fine anyway.
A bit of digging turned up the Wikipedia page linked above, and within it the format syntax description:
”’ID”’ record:
Use:
A header to identify spreadsheet type and creator.
Must be first record in the file.
Yep. If the first record of your CSV file is “ID”, Excel will attempt to intepret the file as SYLK. Changing “ID” to anything else (including “Id” or “id”) fixes the issue.
WarrenP
/ April 25, 2011That’s hilarious. Too bad you can’t just go on the Excel project’s sourceforge page and post a bug.
Warren
Doug Carr
/ December 5, 2011That is just crazy. Thanks again Microsoft for thinking that your software is smarter than it really is.
I just ran into this issue and your tip solved the issue right away.
I thank you so very much for posting this.
Doug
Anna Lear
/ December 5, 2011You’re welcome. Glad I could help!
thebitguru
/ March 21, 2012That dialog was annoying, thanks for posting the solution and the reasoning behind it!
jessamin
/ May 24, 2012I love that I just entered “why excel thinks csv” into google and it autocompleted with sylk. Thank you for posting this solution!
Neil Weinstock (@NeilWeinstock)
/ May 31, 2012Most helpful, thanks for posting. I was flummoxed by this until I searched and found this post.
Gary Hughes
/ September 10, 2012Just arrived here through a Google search. Thanks a lot for your post, it’s solved my problem.
Crazy behaviour in Excel though. Surely checking for a .slk extension would be enough rather than assuming that your .csv must just be wrong? Even just opening as a CSV if the first column name is ‘ID’, the extension is .csv and the SYLK check failed would be better.
Paul S (@Knowsitall69)
/ December 20, 2012Anna – Thank you for saving me a lot of time!