How can I stop Excel from eating my delicious CSV files and excreting useless data?

Problem

I have a database which tracks sales of widgets by serial number. Users enter purchaser data and quantity, and scan each widget into a custom client program. They then finalize the order. This all works flawlessly. Some customers want an Excel-compatible spreadsheet of the widgets they have purchased. We generate this with a PHP script which queries the database and outputs the result as a CSV with the store name and associated data. This works perfectly well too. When opened in a text editor such as Notepad or vi, the file looks like this: As you can see, the serial numbers are present (in this case twice, not all secondary serials are the same) and are long strings of numbers. When this file is opened in Excel, the result becomes: As you may have observed, the serial numbers are enclosed by double quotes. Excel does not seem to respect text qualifiers in .csv files. When importing these files into Access, we have zero difficulty. When opening them as text, no trouble at all. But Exc…