Its a crying shame we never settled on a control character separated text format. There's a ascii control characters for record and field (unit) separators. A bit of user space support for that would have been great.
As I recall, you can tell Awk to use the control characters as record and field separators. Not helpful if you're getting your data from others, but if you're working by yourself, you have the option. I've come to use control characters as a default because it makes life so much easier.
lolive, VisiData has some Excel support. However, don't expect VisiData to be a full blown editor for Excel files. It can provide a view of the data in an Excel spreadsheet.
If you have a python installation available, openpyxl[1] is great both for converting to .csv and for packaging .csv outputs as .xlsx (which is really zipped .xml, anyway).
It is a shame. I have been using tab-separated sheets recently as it allows me to simply not care about almost any possible character in my strings...apart from tabs of course. But those are far less common than commas, and putting strings in quotes 100% of the time looks messy to me.
To be really useful as a format it would just need for text editors to:
-display something distinct for the field separator (some editors do this)
-treat the record separator character like a carriage return (not aware of any editors that do this)
Tab-delimited "csv" formats are quite common (e.g. the CONLL format family for many natural language processing tasks) and also supported by common tools such as MS Excel for decades already.
