It is important for you to decide what formats to choose for your research data when you start to plan your research projects, as it determines how the data may be used, analysed, stored, and reused in the future.
This table contains guidance on file formats recommended and accepted by the UK Data Service.
| Type of data | Recommended formats |
Acceptable formats |
|---|---|---|
| Tabular data with extensive metadata
variable labels, code labels, and defined missing values |
SPSS portable format (.por)
delimited text and command (‘setup’) file (SPSS, Stata, SAS, etc.) structured text or mark-up file of metadata information, e.g. DDI XML file |
proprietary formats of statistical packages: SPSS (.sav), Stata (.dta), MS Access (.mdb/.accdb) |
| Tabular data with minimal metadata
column headings, variable names |
comma-separated values (.csv)
tab-delimited file (.tab) delimited text with SQL data definition statements |
delimited text (.txt) with characters not present in data used as delimiters
widely-used formats: MS Excel (.xls/.xlsx), MS Access (.mdb/.accdb), dBase (.dbf), OpenDocument Spreadsheet (.ods) |
| Geospatial data
vector and raster data |
ESRI Shapefile (.shp, .shx, .dbf, .prj, .sbx, .sbn optional)
geo-referenced TIFF (.tif, .tfw) CAD data (.dwg) tabular GIS attribute data Geography Markup Language (.gml) |
ESRI Geodatabase format (.mdb)
MapInfo Interchange Format (.mif) for vector data Keyhole Mark-up Language (.kml) Adobe Illustrator (.ai), CAD data (.dxf or .svg) binary formats of GIS and CAD packages |
| Textual data | Rich Text Format (.rtf)
plain text, ASCII (.txt) eXtensible Mark-up Language (.xml) text according to an appropriate Document Type Definition (DTD) or schema |
Hypertext Mark-up Language (.html)
widely-used formats: MS Word (.doc/.docx) some software-specific formats: NUD*IST, NVivo and ATLAS.ti |
| Image data | TIFF 6.0 uncompressed (.tif) | JPEG (.jpeg, .jpg, .jp2) if original created in this format
GIF (.gif) TIFF other versions (.tif, .tiff) RAW image format (.raw) Photoshop files (.psd) BMP (.bmp) PNG (.png) Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF/A, PDF) (.pdf) |
| Audio data | Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) (.flac) | MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 (.mp3) if original created in this format
Audio Interchange File Format (.aif) Waveform Audio Format (.wav) |
| Video data | MPEG-4 (.mp4)
OGG video (.ogv, .ogg) motion JPEG 2000 (.mj2) |
AVCHD video (.avchd) |
| Documentation and scripts | Rich Text Format (.rtf)
PDF/UA, PDF/A or PDF (.pdf) XHTML or HTML (.xhtml, .htm) OpenDocument Text (.odt) |
plain text (.txt)
widely-used formats: MS Word (.doc/.docx), MS Excel (.xls/.xlsx) XML marked-up text (.xml) according to an appropriate DTD or schema, e.g. XHMTL 1.0 |
