If you’ve ever tried building on the Cleverscript, or if you’ve ever played around with Spreadsheets, you might have come across the terms “Tab-delimited-file” or “comma separated values,” and few often wonder what the terms really mean.

In simple terms, these are simply formats that save spreadsheets in plain text, i.e. in a manner that can be viewed and easily understood through a simple text editor like Notepad, Gedit, leafpad e.t.c

In a tab delimited file, every line is a row, and the columns are separated by tabs. This sheet for example:

Would look like this:

when viewed through leafpad.

Similarly, when you go for ‘comma seperated values’ it uses commas instead of tabs, for example, the same file would look like this: