The thing that really surprises me is that it doesn’t look at an entire column and use that to determine the datatype to use. Most other data analysis programs (including Excel there is giving it a lot of credit) will look at an entire column, note that one of the CUSIP values is “88579Y10″ and therefore treat everything in that column as plain text instead of a number. Maybe there’s an “import all as text” option that I’m missing in Excel?

The same problem exists in Open Office, but at least that has the following advantages:
1) You can open non-comma delimited files directly instead of having to import them

2) In excel, once you import a tab-delimited file, it creates links to the original file, so if you modify that file, it tries to update it in Excel.

3) This could go either way, but I like that Open Office doesn’t lock the original file, so you can re-generate the .csv while it’s still open. Since it doesn’t automatically update the file like I described above, you’ll have two versions of the data: one open, and one on the disk. And there’s a “refresh” option under the File menu if you want to load the new data.

“Have you ever gotten the “Do you want to save your changes?” dialog box when exiting Excel, even though you didn’t modify the data at all? ”

Thought I was losing my mind. I started just saving my spreadsheets as tab delimited and having to clean them up using Ultraedit.

Let me know if you do find any better programs. Tried Open Office but switched back to Excel.