Beware of CSV files!

If you work with excel files a lot, chances are you’ve had this experience. You start working on an excel file, working hard on formatting, adding and editing formulas, highlighting, creating pivot tables and extra tabs, and as soon as you save or email the file, you realize all your hard work was lost! Lo and behold, what you thought was an excel file may have been a CSV (Comma Separated Values) file.

 
CSV files are very useful, in that they can take a large amount of data and store it in a much smaller amount of space than if you were saving excel. You’ll see lots of different reporting and data software that exports reports and files into CSV format. The sneaky thing is when you open these in excel, they look just like an excel file, and excel even lets you format, add formulas, and add tabs – but when you go and attach the file to an email or save it, all of those formatting changes, formulas, and extra tabs go away! So make sure to save the file as an xls or xlsx file before saving or emailing.

Cheers!