I'm writing a web app (Java) which allows users to select contacts. The contacts details can be downloaded (currently in CSV format) and used to perform a mail merge in Word 2007.
I would like to use a format which is a bit more 'robust' than CSV. Those of you in non-English areas will know the comma/semicolon problems!
Which format would you use?
Not having much experience in "non-English" mail merges, what's wrong with exporting the contacts in xlsx format and using that as your datasource?
I prefer TSV (Tab Separated Values) for this sort of task. I have never encountered a dataset containing literal tabs that were desired in the output.
Depending on the reasons you have your user doing the mail-merge, you could consider moving all the work to the server side. When the user selects the contacts and clicks ok, get the server to mail-merge and create the doc for the user and send it to them. Docmosis or JODReports can provide this capability. You could also allow the user to select different templates or if you are really generous, let the users upload their own.