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Reading and Writing Excel Spreadsheets

If PDF is the lingua franca of display formatting, then Microsoft Excel is the common tongue of spreadsheet data. Microsoft's ubiquitous Office suite means that nearly every office has some way of reading Microsoft Word documents and exchanging Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.

Most spreadsheet programs can accept a format called Comma Separated Values (CSV). This is simply a table where the values are separated by commas. An example of a CSV table is shown below.

CSV table of Academy Award winners. Year,Best Picture,Gross,Budget,Best Actor,Best Actress,Best Director 1965,My Fair Lady,72000000,17000000,Rex Harrison,Julie Andrews ,George Cukor 1966,The Sound of Music,163214286,8200000,Lee Marvin,Julie Christie,Robert ...