When Saving as CSV is it necessary to get Excel involved?

When I save my LibreOffice Spreadsheet as a CSV, it automatically saves into an Excel CSV file.

Is this normal? Are there alternatives then Excel? For instance, just using Libre and avoiding Excel?

Thank you,
Omar832

CSV are plain text files. The issue may be your computer is set to open up CSV files with Excel, but file associations can be modified. You may set up your computer to (by default) use LibreOffice to open CSV files (in Windows 8.1 it’s Control Panel/Default Programs/Associate a file type…, or you can just use “Open With”), but that won’t prevent a different computer from associating/using Excel to open the file.