Frankly, the whole "it's pointless, so this is stupid" response to some things is more tiring to me than anything. What exactly is the end-game for these people? All or nothing? That is just delusional. It is simply not how progress is made. So let's be appreciative of what little is done, and push for more?
Not to mention the amount of people in here just focusing on the fine - by the way, I don't know how people can square the belief that these companies are endlessly greedy and will do anything for more money, with the belief that half a billion euros lost profit will just sit well with them - while completely ignoring the bit where these companies either comply or face even more fines.
CSV works because CSV is understood by non technical people who have to deal with some amount of technicality. CSV is the friendship bridge that prevents technical and non technical people from going to war.
I can tell an MBA guy to upload a CSV file and i'll take care of it. Imagine i tell him i need everything in a PARQUET file!!! I'm no longer a team player.
Indeed the my main use is most financial services will output your records in csv, although I mostly open that in excel which sometimes gets a bit confused.
This is incorrect. Everyone uses Excel, not CSV. There are billions of people on this planet who know what to do with an .xlsx file.
Do the same with a .CSV file and you'll have to teach those people how to use the .CSV importer in Excel and also how to set up the data types for each column etc. It's a non trivial problem that forces you down to a few million people.
.CSV is a niche format for inexperienced software developers.
Among the shit I have seen in CSV, no " for strings, including those with a return char, innovative SEP, date, numbers, no escape for " within strings, rows related to the reporting tools used to export to CSV etc
True. But most of those problems are pretty easy for the non-technical person to see, understand, and (often) fix. Which strengthens the "friendship bridge".
(I'm assuming the technical person can easily write a basic parsing script for the CSV data - which can flag, if not fix, most of the format problems.)
For a dataset of any size, my experience is that most of the time & effort goes into handling records which do not comply with the non-technical person's beliefs about their data. Which data came from (say) an old customer database - and between bugs in the db software, and abuse by frustrated, lazy, or just ill-trained CSR's, there are all sorts of "interesting" things, which need cleaning up.
I can't help but recommend an accounting software called Manager (https://www.manager.io/). You install it on your computer and its free. It's probably the most beautifully designed accounting software i have come across. They also have a cloud version.
I first came across Manager about 5 years ago and wanted my accountants to use it. However they chose Xero because they were 'used to Xero'.
I still have Manager installed and play around with it whenever i need inspiration.
The downloadable version is single user. All data is stored in an SQLITE file which you can just copy-paste if you have to move computers. You can decide where you want to store the SQLITE file. I ended up choosing a shared dropbox folder. Guess what, now i have a multi-user version. Although, i'm not sure if the Manager team would recommend this approach.
It’s a closed-source software managed by a single person who appears to be residing in Australia. I’m not surprised your accountants didn’t want to use it.
