>> My guess is it would be more foolproof to edit that stuff with a >> spreadsheet. > > Many years ago, I worked with somebody who used a spreadsheet like > that.
I really love Emacs, however... One of the traders here where I work (who shall not be named) had a space-delimited data file with hundreds of rows and 50 or so columns. I could never get him to edit it in any kind of spreadsheet or put it in a database (expecting him to master SQL would have been pointless - I would have had to write a GUI tool for him). He always modified it in Emacs, and would delete columns, add extra spaces, fragmentary rows, etc. He'd edit this file late at night, the automated processes the next morning would crap out, and I would scramble to try and find and fix the problem before the market opened. This is clearly a case where choosing the proper tool is important. I agree that using a spreadsheet to edit a 3x5 CSV file is likely overkill (might just as well use Notepad or TextEdit), but tabular data are tabular data, no matter how they might be delimited, and if there are many of those little data critters, there are better tools than a text editor (or Python IDE) for maintaining them. Skip -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
