Ms. Sapper, a marketing manager in a global accounting firm, was this year’s coordinator for her firm’s annual partner meeting. With 400 partners from around the world, Sapper faced daunting communications tasks that she wanted to automate as much as possible. Sapper received a file containing all partners’ names, as well as additional personal information, from her IT department. The file ended with the extension “CSV.” She wondered to herself what to do next. The CSV, or comma separated values format, is a very basic data format that most database applications use to import or export data. As a minimum, the CSV format groups all fields in a record into a single line of text. It then separates each field within a line with a comma or other delimiter. When the text information contains commas, the format requires this text information to be placed within quotes. Sapper needed to get these data into Excel. Given how busy the IT guys appeared, she decided to do this herself.
a. Download and save “partners.csv” from the MIS 10e OLC. Open the file using Microsoft Word. Remember to look for the “csv” file type when searching for the file to open. Describe the data’s appearance.
b. Describe in your own words why you think database manufacturers use common formats to import and export data from their systems.