# Choosing The Right File Format/Quick Guide
## Quick Guide to recommended formats

For an explanation of terminology read the section "Formats for storing electronic information".
| Data Type | Preferred formats | Common OpenSource applications | Common proprietary applications |
| Documents | Plain text, encoded with either ASCII (limited to the English alphabet) or Unicode UTF-8 RTF (Rich Text Format) - Proprietary, open specification by Microsoft PDF (Portable Document Format) - Proprietary, open specification by Adobe EPS (Encapsulated Post Script) - Proprietary, open specification by Adobe OOXML aka DOCX (Office Open XML) - controversially non-proprietary, open specification by Ecma International and ISO/IEC ODF (OpenDocument Format) - non-proprietary, open specification by OASIS and ISO | Notepad++, gedit, kate, AbiWord, OpenOffice.org Writer, KWord, PDFCreator, Geany, vim, emacs | Notepad, Adobe Acrobat, Corel WordPerfect, Microsoft Word, Star Office |
| Spreadsheets | ODS (OpenDocument Spreadsheet) - non-proprietary, open specification by OASIS and ISO OOXML aka XLSX (Office Open XML) - controversially non-proprietary, open specification by Ecma International and ISO/IEC CSV (Comma Separated Values) - Non-standard conventional format where a comma is used to separate each value | OpenOffice.org Calc, Lotus 1-2-3, Gnumeric, KSpread | Microsoft Excel, Corel Quattro Pro |
| Web pages | HTML (HyperText Markup Language) or XML (eXtensible Markup Language) - Non-proprietary, open specifications by W3C | Abiword, OpenOffice2.0, Mozilla composer, Quanta, Geany | Dreamweaver, Adobe GoLive |
| Graphics (raster & vector) | PNG (Portable Network Graphic) - non-proprietary, open specification. Released as ISO/IEC 15948:2003 and W3C recommendation (ref) JPEG/JPG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) Non-proprietary, open specification by the Joint Photographic Experts Group DjVuLibre (pronounced "déjà vu") Non-proprietary, open specification by lizardtech CGM (Computer Graphics Metafile) - Non-proprietary, open specification by ISO/IEC SVG (Scalable Vector Graphic) - Non-proprietary, open specification by W3C VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) - Non-proprietary, open specification by W3C DXF (Drawing eXchange Format) - Proprietary, partially open specification by Autodesk | Gimp, TuxPaint, OpenOffice.org Draw, Blender, Inkscape, krita, kolourpaint | Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, 3DStudioMax, AutoCAD |
| Audio | Audio has containers with codecs in together they form a format. Ogg container with vorbis, flac, speex and others Flac container with flac audio. MP3 Can contain mp3 audio. | Audacity, Ardour | Adobe Soundbooth |
| Video | Video also has containers with codecs in together they form a format. Ogg container with Theora WebM container with VP8 video compression format and vorbis audio compression format MP4 container with h.264 video compression format and mp3 audio compression format | Openshot , KDEnlive | Adobe Premiere , Windows Movie Maker |
| Database | Databases do not use files in the normal sense, however a good database can output its content structured with SQL (Structured Query Language) - an ANSI/ISO standard. It is also important that it supports ODBC (Open Data Base Connectivity) | PostgreSQL, MySQL, Firebird and InterBase, Kexi | Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle and Sybase |
| Encrypted files | OpenPGP - Non-proprietary, open specification, OpenSSL | GnuPG (GNU Privacy Guard) | PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) |