Text files

Rich text format (RTF) is used for the majority of qualitative studies. Rich text format files will open into most text editors and almost all word processing packages. Other formats may include plain text (.txt), MS Word (.doc, .docx) or OpenDocument (.odt) format.

Portable document format (.pdf)

Documents or Scans are often provided in Portable Document Format (.pdf), as it is a file format independent of application software, hardware and operating systems and can be viewed by the free-of-charge Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Multimedia files

Qualitative data collections may contain audio or video recordings or digital images. Audio files are mostly supplied in .mp3 format (usually generated from the source .wav files during processing). Digital image files are commonly made available in JPEG (.jpg), TIFF (.tif or .tiff) or PNG (.png) format, though other formats may be available as well. Popular video formats are AVI (.avi), QuickTime (.mov) and MPEG-2 (.mpg).