This one’s for Karen.

We’ve experienced issues with trying to open files in Excel that we know should open. The common example is with csv files. Say we have a file named data.csv that we wish to load into Excel. We choose to Open a new file. At the top of the window is a drop-down selection menu to Enable certain files. The default choice is “All Readable Documents”. This choice is no good, however, as our data.csv remains faded in the finder window, and we are unable to select it.

At this point, our normal workaround is to add a.txt extension to the file, so that data.csv becomes data.csv.txt. This activates the file in the finder window, giving us the ability to open it. This workaround, while trivial, is tedious (when dealing with lots of files) and also unnecessary.

Instead of changing file names, you can change the Enable drop-down menu to “All Documents”. The data.csv still remains faded in the finder window. However, it is now selectable and can be opened in Excel, without a .txt extension.

In my opinion, this is a poor design of the application interface. Faded file names usually means that a file is not selectable. When enabling “All Documents” in the Open window, the data.csv text should appear activated as a visual cue that I can now select on that item. (Note: The icon of the data.csv file does appear activated at this step. It is only the file name text that remains faded).

Often I would edit a file on my local machine using applications such as Dreamweaver or Excel. When I read these files in a UNIX terminal, the newlines are not displayed and instead are replaced with ^M characters. This makes the file appear convoluted and virtually unreadable. Here’s a fix to convert those ^M characters back to the newline characters so that the files display correctly.

Open the file in vi and type the command
:s/\r/\r/g

This performs a global search and replace through the file, replacing \r characters with \r. I don’t know why this works, but it does!

Note: You can change your settings in Dreamweaver so that newline chars are saved for UNIX format. Go to Preferences > Code Format and select Line Break Type to LF (Unix). This eliminates the problem at the source for Dreamweaver files. I have not yet discovered a solution for Excel files, so the vi workaround works well for those.