Files in the text file format are files in which the bytes represent the text characters of a particular character set using a specific system to relate the binary numbers in the file to the text characters of the set. Such systems are called 'encodings' and become an issue when the file includes characters that are not in the standard ASCII set, such as characters in languages other than English. Character encodings are explained in greater detail in Section 14.4.1.1 ― Character Encodings.
Choosing Import Text File... menu item in the Import Data submenu of the Data menu or the Import Other File... menu item in the Import Data submenu of the Data menu and specifying the "Text import (configurable)" or "Text export (configurable)" file formats to open or save files will cause Gnumeric to start the Text Import or Text Export druids. These allow the users to configure in detail the parameters with which existing files will be read into a workbook or existing workbooks will be output to a file.
The Text file format includes a number of different formatting strategies for text files in which data fields are structured in a regular pattern. Most of these formats represent rows of data on different lines of the file using different strategies to separated data values within each row. 'Fixed-width' formats place each data entry in a separate column and therefore limit the size of the data entries. 'Separated' formats use a special character or character sequence to separate entries. For instance, the comma separated value, the tab separated value formats and the space separated value formats use commas, tabs, and spaces respectively to separate the data fields.
Gnumeric can import and export files from and to a wide variety of text file formats when the text importer or the text exporter is configured appropriately. File can be generated with many different encodings. See the section on importing text files or the section on exporting text files for an explanation of how to import or export these formatted text files.
| Name: | Text File Format |
| Extensions: | .text / .txt / none |
| Compatible Programs: | Many programs can read and create formatted text files |
| Import / Export: | Both |
The exporter can only create text files using a separator character and cannot create fixed-width structured files.
Supported by the core Gnumeric program.
Text file format files are simple text files containing the data for each cell of the worksheet organized in a systematic fashion.
Text format files can be processed using any tool which operates on text files, and many other applications can read or generate one or more of these formats.