One thing I learned about CSV - there is no standard format for CSV except that it is separated by commas, and I think that it also separates records by some sort of end-of-line character which happens to be application or system dependent (could be cr, lf, or both). The end result of this is that you may find yourself massaging your data with a programmer's editor to feed it into your favorite database, application such as Top Producer, Act!, Goldmine, or spreadsheet. There's a technical term for it, but that escapes me now.

Programmer's editors like Notepad++ have the capability of handline curious end-of-line situations (unlike Notepad), will not scramble your data like Microsoft Word, and have powerful editing features like regular expression search and replace for the programmer types.

Excel

Excel *I think* makes use of quotes once in a great while. but for the most part it does not. it is comma separated format just like a tab separated format file. cr+lf for end-of-line (end-of-row).

OpenOffice.org

OpenOffice.org base will not read Excel CSV files. Excel can read OpenOffice.org CSV files because it's well formatted. The reason stems from the fact that OpenOffice.org Calc *always* uses double-quotes on string values and uses cr+lf for line/row endings (3.0.1). However, 2.4.1 Base this was not true of, it uses lf only, and I can't remember whether it made use of double-quotes or not. That version of Base refuses to read Excel files or even Calc files (I could not get them to fix the bug).