Text Qualified CSV Files

Text Qualifiers

Text Qualifiers are characters used to indicate that everything in between them should be interpreted by software programs exactly as it appears. Quotation marks are the most common qualifier. In the case of Census files, many of the geographic codes have leading zeros (i.e. "070" rather than "70") in order to sort properly. However, some spreadsheet programs such as Microsoft Excel, automatically remove the leading zeros. So, by qualifying the cell content as "text", the leading zeros are preserved.

CSV Files

"CSV" stands for "comma separated values" or "cell content separated with a comma". Because CSV files contain only the cell content, separating commas, a character that separates each row and perhaps a set of characters qualifying the text, they can be opened in virtually all software. They also are much smaller than files exclusively associated with a particular type of software because they don't have all of the proprietary formatting that goes with the commercial software.