Filetype amusement

The right people will understand this.

A colleague received a data file from a database person at a government agency she's been working with. The file extension was "*.csv" -- but she wasn't able to import it into her statistical software (she kept getting an error message saying “this data is not in comma-separated file format”).

However, MS Excel opened it just fine.

Turns out that the data person had saved the data as an *.xls file -- and then manually changed the file extension to *.csv.

Um. It doesn’t actually… work like that.


--GG