The file formats used by GPS to save and open the GPS data files are called comma separated files. Let’s have a look. You see that Windows identifies this particular file as an Excel comma separated values file. Let’s open the file and see what it looks like. Depending on your operating system, you may be asked to parse the file and give Excel an indication of the type of separation that’s used to separate the fields. In that case, selecting the delimited and comma options will make the file open very easily.

Comma separated files are very easy to manipulate within the Excel platform, which makes them very easy to use. You’ll note that the first column contains a number of comments and allows us to understand the nature of the of the individual rows and the variable names that are used by the program to identify individual varies. Tables. But this contains all of the information unique to the simulation and all changes that have taken place from the default values are maintained here. It is possible to make changes to individual cells and update the file manually if it’s necessary, but generally though we should make all of these changes within the context of GPS. When I get out of this and go back to GPS, if I save a new file. We’ll give this a different name. We’ll call this now, July 2. I will save this to the GPS folder and let’s see if it’s there. And here you see we’ve created a new a new file GPS data file in the Excel comma separated values format. There are a number of other files that are used by GPS. They’re also comma separated values, but they’re stored in a different file location to keep them separated because they’re used by the program, and are not changeable by the user. Well that summarizes the file formats. Remember CSV’s are the standard for our use within GPS and are readily modifiable with care by using Microsoft Excel. Well that will do it for this video, feel free to visit other parts of the GPS knowledge base to learn more about using the program.