Microsoft Excel's Unintelligent Defaults (multi-ligual CSV failure)
One of the best thing to do in an application is to work hard on the default behaviour, 95% of users never change their settings so the defaults really are vital to the use of the program. Excel has wonderful features but its defaults are extremely frustrating. Many of them I simply do not understand, for example if a column has leading zeroes then the user probably wants to keep them! However, I came across one issue which I had not experienced until now. Anyone who has had to deal with internationalisation will probably be aware of the differences in European decimals for example 1,000.00 in UK & US is written as 1.000,00 in many European countries. Microsoft Windows has region settings which take these into account. Excel uses the region settings as the default method for formatting files. This seems reasonable but it contains a setting called list separator which it uses as the default separator for reading a CSV file. If your region is one where "," is the stand...