csv attachments

Slight update - the issue here may be more on the Outlook side - or both Apple's Mail and Microsoft's Outlook may be to blame. It does remind me of issues such as MIME encoding and .dat that seems only to occur on Outlook - almost like they make it so painful to use anything other than Outllook to talk to anyone using Outlook that everyone will just default to it to save from having to explain to the Outlook user (who likely has no choice) that they have lousy software and ought to change.

When I open the same sent file form Apple Mail and use a client other than Outlook to download/open the file - there is no issue - when I use an email client other than Apple Mail (and I did not test a vast array of clients, just a not-Apple client) to open the file then there is no issue on the Outlook side.

In other words -

from Apple Mail to MS Outlook = bad

from webmail to MS Outlook = okay

from Apple Mail to webmail = okay

from webmail to webmail = okay

Even more additional info

It does not seem to mater whether you are using Windows Outlook or Mac OS Outlook - when on the recieving end they both inroduce the extra line feeds

Outlook 2007 is what I have tested with - the other end might be 2003, 2007 or 2010 on the windows side - and 2011 on hte Mac side.

Yes send windows attachemnt was checked and makes no difference.

Yes zip is an option.

Opening and saving each file in xls format is an option - however, I would have to do that operation at least a dozen times a day - which coudl get annoying - maybe a folder action setup to open each csv and resave it as an xls automatically might work.

The output file that I send gets copied and pasted into another doc - and then is not needed - so the extra work involved in converting the csv in advance seems inefficient.

Not using email to share the files might be an option.

For the moment the simplest option is for me to NOT use Apple Mail to send - or to instruct the folks on the other end to NOT use Outlook to receive.

Over the past decade or so I have created about 12,000 csv files - and while that is only about 1,200 a year or an average of about 5 a day - i am not the only one creating them and there is more than one person on the team that needs to process the files. So I am looking for the simplest - easiest - most comprehensive solution.

This was not a problem in the past because we all used Windows OS and MS Office Professional - a number of us have recently switched to Mac OS and not using MS Office (or at least not using Outlook).

The solution turns out (at least for me for now) to be an automator folder action with shell script where the shel script looks like this:

for f in "$@"

do

sed 's/'$'\r''$//' "$f" > "$f.new" && mv "$f.new" "$f"

echo $f >> csvlog.txt

done

which should replace the carriage return at the end of each line - leaving the line feed

or something like this

for f in "$@"

do

tr -d '\r' < "$f" > "$f.new"

mv "$f.new" "$f"

done

they both seem to work.

for other uses the substitution may need to be different.