I learned a fun trick today at work. Excel for XP can open a simple XML document and just do the right thing. This isn’t a special Microsoft Excel XML format, just some relatively straightforward document I hand coded, repeating containers became rows, repeating fields became columns, I didn’t push it too hard, but I was impressed. Woohoo, no more generating CSV files for exporting data! Self documenting export data here we come! So I just tried it at home, thought I would push Excel a bit, see just how smart it really is. Um, well, bad news. Proprietary software sucks. It seems that Excel for Mac doesn’t understand XML, or at least the version I’m using which must be at least a year old. Microsoft recently announced I can send them some money and get a more recent version, but I find that offer less then enticing. Unfortunately CSV files will be with us a little longer. (on a side note can Gnumeric do this? Import arbitrary XML files? I’ll take a stab at getting it installed the next time I’m really bored)