>>This gets rid of the dang double quote problem....
>>
>>COPY to myfile.csv delimited with "" with character '|'
>>
>>...if you do that command it creates a file without those stupid quote marks, delimited with the pipe symbol.
>>
>>...Sorry I was late to the game here I didn't notice the thread till just now - but perhaps this can help you out now or in the future. This is one quirk that got me stuck in the past.
>
>Victor,
>I couldn't understand how this would solve the problem. Wouldn't it be a new and more serious problem in itself? If for a second you think it could work, what would happen to a field that contains | ? Or a field with comma, apostrophe, tilde ... in it? Or one with date time data? I would repeat my warning that trying to transfer data to Excel using text is asking for trouble (unless that text is a well known data interchange format, say, XML).

You could pick something besides the | as the delimiter - I guess pick a special character of some kind that doesn't appear in your data. As for the date format I dunno if Excel is smart enough to change that or not. I suppose you could use OLE automation with Excel and change it somehow if it doesn't do it for you on import.