Essentially, this is a datafile for the game. A designer does manually edit the file to add something to it, then it gets converted to a binary database format by the build system. Every other file like it works fine when edited by Excel since they don't have dates, but this one file causes a designer grief nearly every time.

For the tools we have already installed on systems, Excel works the best for editing them. I doubt the cost of a product like UltraEdit could be justified when what we have should work fine. I should have known Office would yet again do something it thinks is helpful, and offer no way to turn it off.