CSV vs Excel- What's the Difference?

Excel	CSV
It is a binary file that holds information about all the worksheets in a workbook	CSV stands for Comma Separated Values. It is a plain text format with a series of values separated by commas
An Excel not only stores data but can also do operations on the data	A CSV file is just a text file, it stores data but does not contain formatting, formulas, macros, etc. It is also known as flat files
Excel is a spreadsheet that saves files into its own proprietary format viz xls or xlsx	CSV is a format for saving tabular information into a delimited text file with extension .csv
Files saved in excel cannot be opened or edited by text editors	CSV files can be opened or edited by text editors like notepad
In data-warehouse, Excel is preferable for detailed standardized schema specification	In data-warehouse, CSV follows a fairly flat, simple schema
Any programming language library to parse Excel data is generally larger, slower and complicated	Any programming language to parse CSV data is trivial, generating it is extremely easy
With no clear distinction or separation between numeric values and text, Excel can mess up with your postal codes and credit card numbers with its auto formatting features	CSV is safe and can clearly differentiate between the numeric values and text. CSV does not manipulate data and stores it as-is.
In Excel, you have to have a start tag and end tag for each column in each row	In CSV, you write column headers only once
Excel consumes more memory while importing data	Importing CSV files can be much faster, and it also consumes less memory

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