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!