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> Some idiot somewhere decided that Comma Separated Values in certain locales should be based on semicolons

Semicolons are really better though, because they aren't used as a decimal separator unlike commas in most countries.

I don't know about Excel, but LibreOffice allows very easily to select which parameters to use when opening a CSV file, it works just fine.



> Semicolons are really better though, because they aren't used as a decimal separator unlike commas in most countries.

If you're going to separate values with semicolons--which is perfectly reasonable--I feel like you probably shouldn't do that with a format called Comma Separated Values.


Picking a less-common separator might help but you could also just follow RFC 4180 and quote fields that have commas then double any single quotes in values.


You can also use the file import wizard in Excel to make similar choices. But that's not the default behavior for files with a .csv extension.




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