each line in csv file represents row in the spreadsheetand commas separate the cells in the row for examplethe spreadsheet example xlsx from : ,apples, : ,cherries, : ,pears, : ,oranges, : ,apples, : ,bananas, : ,strawberries, will use this file for this interactive shell examples you can download example csv from text into text editor and save it as example csv csv files are simplelacking many of the features of an excel spreadsheet for examplecsv filesdon' have types for their values--everything is string don' have settings for font size or color don' have multiple worksheets can' specify cell widths and heights can' have merged cells can' have images or charts embedded in them the advantage of csv files is simplicity csv files are widely supported by many types of programscan be viewed in text editors (including mu)and are straightforward way to represent spreadsheet data the csv format is exactly as advertisedit' just text file of comma-separated values since csv files are just text filesyou might be tempted to read them in as string and then process that string using the techniques you learned in for examplesince each cell in csv file is separated by commamaybe you could just call split(','on each line of text to get the comma-separated values as list of strings but not every comma in csv file represents the boundary between two cells csv files also have their own set of escape characters to allow commas and other characters to be included as part of the values the split(method doesn' handle these escape characters because of these potential pitfallsyou should always use the csv module for reading and writing csv files