File Organization & File Formats

File formats: preferred examples

Proprietary Format

Alternative/Preferred Format

Excel (.xls, .xlsx)

Comma Separated Values (.csv) ASCII

Word (.doc, .docx)

plain text (.txt), XML, PDF/A, HTML, ODF

or if formatting is needed, PDF/A (.pdf)

PowerPoint (.ppt, .pptx)

PDF/A (.pdf), ODP, JPEG 2000, PDF, PNG

Photoshop (.psd)

TIFF (.tif, .tiff),

Quicktime (.mov)

MPEG-4 (.mp4), MOV, AVI, MXF

Sounds

WAVE, AIFF

Containers

TAR, GZIP, ZIP

Databases

XML, CSV