File without KEYS

After the keyword Data follows all data cells that belong to the table.

In most cases the cells are written with one record per line in the table. The number of records will thus be determined by the number of values in the stub. The length of the records depends upon the number of values in the heading, and also upon the size of figures.

Table cells that contain a dash, one, two, three, four, five or six dots should be within quotation marks.

For data without keys it is possible to write all cells in just one record, terminated by a semicolon.

Traditionally PC-Axis has accepted the delimiters comma, space, semicolon, tabulator. The different delimiters are synonyms and can be mixed in the file.
Today only space delimiter is recommended. When the data cells are on several lines each line should have a space at the ending.

Files with KEYS

For every variable in the stub is indicated the value for the variable within quotation marks, comma separated, followed by all datacells for that row (no quotation marks, space separated).

Whether the text from VALUES or from CODES are used for a variable is indicated by the keyword KEYS("var")=CODES or KEYS("var")=VALUES. It is possible to use VALUES from one variable and CODES for another in the same file.

Rows that only contain 0 (zeros) are excluded from the file

One - six dots

Data that is missing is stored as one, two, three, four, five or six dots.

It is not possible to get a dot or two dots by excluding a value. Thus, you can not write 1,,2,3 in order to get 1,".",3,4

For PC-Axis version prior to 2005 a dash is presented as 0 and saved as 0. Thus, you cannot afterwards find out if the original value was - or 0. Starting with 2005 PC-Axis keeps track on which cells are – and the keyword Datasymbolnil can be used to show something else in the table.

How the dots are shown on screen is determined by the keywords Datasymbol1, etc. If these keywords are missing the presentation is taken from PC-Axis text file under [global]datasymbol1 and datasymbol2 etc.

Number of decimals when a file is saved

The key word DECIMALS determines the number of decimals to be saved. If the file also contains the key word PRECISION, PC-AXIS saves as many decimals as corresponds to the largest number specified by DECIMALS or PRECISION. All cells are stored with the same number of decimals.