It is crucial whether you open "SAFI_clean" in an excel or in Calc

[lrskjr]

Hi!

I'm confused. When I open the file with Excel I get one result, when I open the file with CalC I get another result!

It may be a good idea to point out that this problem may occur.

I imagine that people like to use excel, because they ofte have that program installed, but they get a totally wrong result.

As far as I can see, this is not a problem that a teacher can fix in a teaching situation, so it would be nice to be prepared on the situation.

I do not know why the problem occurs, but the result is that values ​​are missing in several columns, if you open the file with Excel.

Im looking through the teaching material, because I'll be using it in Norway next month.

All the best
Lars

[josenino95]

I think that the problem here stems from the regional configuration on your pc if you open the SAFI_clean.csv file with Excel, or how you setup the Text Import when you open the file with LibreOffice Calc. And beyond this, the problem is in the lesson when we ask learners to open a csv file in Excel or Calc but we don't tell them how (just double click? Or having Excel open go to Data-> Get Data -> From Text/CSV, or having Calc go to File -> Open)

If we stick to reading the csv, we should add to the lesson the explanation on how to import the data from the csv in Excel and Calc. Just double click is not going to work, as Excel formats the data correctly in columns if my regional configuration is "English (United States)" that has as default the colon as column separator. But if my regional configuration is "Spanish (Latin America)" the double click method is going to mess up the data as it uses a semicolon as column separator.

In my opinion, it would be better to just have learners download a .xlsx file instead of a .csv to work with in the quality assurance episode. So we should upload that .xlsx somewhere. What are your thoughts @Bsolodzi @datacarpentry/curriculum-advisors-social-science @datacarpentry/core-team-curriculum ?

This discussion/issue is related to #89.