Apple Numbers and CSV Files

The Mac OS X spreadsheet program 'Numbers', from Apple and part of the iWork suite, is a competitor to Microsoft Excel. There are some things about it I prefer to Excel, others where I prefer Excel.

But one glaring omission in Numbers is that it will not open a Comma Separated Values (CSV) file from the Open menu. CSV files are a standard way to exchange spreadsheet datasets and not being able to load them into Numbers makes no sense.

In fact there is a way to do this by Drag and Dropping the file into a worksheet.

1: Your CSV file MUST have a .csv suffix - you will just copy the filename otherwise.
2: Drag and Drop the file into a single cell of an open worksheet - choose the cell that will take the 'top left' value of your dataset.
3: That's it - simple once you know the trick - seemingly impossible until you do...

Numbers will accept tab delimited files via the Open menu option with no problems.


Update: 2012-08-27
This restriction is no longer the case - Numbers will read .csv files from the Open menu just fine - don't when things changed