CSV is great, but Excel is more or less the industry standard for "mortals". Of course you can import CSV in Excel, but a lot of end users doesn't know how. Character encoding could also get tricky and Excel handles fields with multiple components poorly (eg. multiple choice with more than one option selected for a given field of one record) when importing from CSV (it breaks up the columns incorrectly) compared to importing into Google Docs, saving as Excel and then Excel displays it perfectly.
This causes so much extra trouble for the end user.
Thanks for your thoughts here, but for the reasons you mentioned (character encoding issues, formatting for 'multi' select objects, etc.) it's unlikely that we'll allow imports from Excel.
Feel free to let us know if there are any tips or tricks that you've found is helpful for saving Excel files as .csv files that we could add to our Importing help article.
The topic itself is regarding exporting to Excel, not just exporting CSV and the importing to Excel. This should be a basic feature for any paid software. (Although slightly less basic than providing date format YYYY-MM-DD)
Let the customer/admin select the character encoding and there your responsibility ends.
Formatting for multi select? It is already done in CSV export “[DATA1],[DATA2],[ETC]”