What is a CSV?

Because a CSV file is just plain text — no proprietary binary format, no required software to open it — it has become the lowest-common-denominator way to move tabular data between systems that otherwise share no common API. Nearly every spreadsheet tool, database, and business application can export to and import from CSV, which makes it the default fallback whenever two systems need to exchange data but don't have a direct integration. The format's simplicity is also its main limitation: CSV has no native way to represent data types (everything is text until something parses it), no nested or hierarchical structure, and inconsistent handling of edge cases like a comma inside a quoted field or different character encodings, which is a common source of subtle import bugs. Values containing the separator character are typically wrapped in quotes, but not every tool implements this identically, which is why CSV parsing bugs are so common in practice. Despite these limitations, CSV remains foundational to business data workflows precisely because of its universality — it's often the fastest way to get data out of a legacy system or into one that has no modern API.