The news he's broken has been covered by outlets like the BBC, The Verge, Slate, Gizmodo, Engadget, TechCrunch, Digital Trends, ZDNet, The Next Web, and Techmeme. Beyond the column, he wrote about everything from Windows to tech travel tips. He founded PCWorld's 'World Beyond Windows' column, which covered the latest developments in open-source operating systems like Linux and Chrome OS. He also wrote the USA's most-saved article of 2021, according to Pocket.Ĭhris was a PCWorld columnist for two years. Beyond the web, his work has appeared in the print edition of The New York Times (September 9, 2019) and in PCWorld's print magazines, specifically in the August 2013 and July 2013 editions, where his story was on the cover. With over a decade of writing experience in the field of technology, Chris has written for a variety of publications including The New York Times, Reader's Digest, IDG's PCWorld, Digital Trends, and MakeUseOf. Chris has personally written over 2,000 articles that have been read more than one billion times-and that's just here at How-To Geek. Some CSV files may not even have the headers at the top, and some may use quotation marks to surround each bit of data, but that's the basic format.Ĭhris Hoffman is the former Editor-in-Chief of How-To Geek. They can be more complicated than that, and can contain thousands of lines, more entries on each line, or long strings of text. You'd get a file containing text like this: For example, let's say you have a few contacts in a contact manager, and you export them as a CSV file.

The idea is that you can export complex data from one application to a CSV file, and then import the data in that CSV file into another application.Ī CSV file has a fairly simple structure.

They mostly use the comma character to separate (or delimit) data, but sometimes use other characters, like semicolons. CSV files may sometimes be called Character Separated Values or Comma Delimited files.

Flat file vs csv