We have been recommending for some time a program called Ron's Editor to anyone we have found out is using Microsoft Excel to open / edit donor data. If you head over here you can nowBuy Ron's Editor at 20% discountFor anyone we haven't yet bored with why we recommend Ron, here's the (perhaps shocking to some) reason why:Excel is a state of the art spreadsheet application. It has been designed from the ground up as a numeric analysis tool, perfect for people such as engineers or people working in finance. It can analyse, slice, dice and graph all kinds of data, and is even fully programmable.What Excel is not, is a text editor. Unfortunately, the fact that Excel presents its main window in a table format, and can load CSV files, confuses many people into thinking that it has been designed to do the job of editing CSV files. It has, in fact, been designed for a completely different job.If you do attempt to use Microsoft Excel for text editing you will need to know tips and tricks for preventing its purposeful design from trying to change or 'corrupt' your data. We can't recommend more strongly to our customers that you use a csv editor instead and even uninstall Excel if you can.A real CSV editor (like Ron's Editor) is designed from the ground up as a text editor, and does not get confused about what it is doing with your data. Not only that, but it is full of features that have been tailored for exactly the job of editing CSV files, mostly requested by people doing exactly that job.I'm sure you'll let us know how you go, but you're welcome :)
