Exporting from data tables

Copy and paste

The best way to take Prism data or results and place into Word or PowerPoint is via copy and paste. If you do this, you'll find that Prism's tables remain tables when they are pasted. In contrast, if you export then import a text file, Word or PowerPoint won't format it as a table.

Exporting Prism data

From any data or results table, click on the Export button on the toolbar and choose the format you want to use.

CSV

CSV stands for "comma-delimited values", but the name is a bit misleading. In the Preferences dialog, you can choose to export values using a period (point) or a comma as the decimal separator. If you choose a period (the US standard), then adjacent columns are indeed separated by commas. If you choose a comma, then adjacent columns or subcolumns are separated by semicolons.

This is a very standard format useful for moving blocks of data into spreadsheet or word processing programs like Excel and Word.

When Prism exports into CSV, it doesn't distinguish row titles, X columns, Y columns, and subcolumns. All the values are simply exported. Special characters (Greek, subscripts, etc.) are lost from column and row titles.

TXT

This format is very similar to CSV, except that adjacent columns are separated with tabs. These are common formats and can be used to easily move blocks of data into spreadsheet or word processing programs like Excel and Word.

This is a very standard format useful for moving blocks of data into spreadsheet or word processing programs like Excel and Word.

When Prism exports into TXT, it doesn't distinguish row titles, X columns, Y columns, and subcolumns. All the values are simply exported. Special characters (Greek, subscripts, etc.) are lost from column and row titles

XML

When you export in XML format, the exported file includes all special formatting, including Greek characters, subscript, superscript, subcolumn formats, etc. When you later import an XML file, everything should just work. There is no ambiguity about whether commas are for decimals, thousands, or used to separate columns.

If your goal is to export a data table from Prism 5 on one computer and import it into Prism 5 on another computer, you should choose XML format.

While Prism follows standard XML conventions, the way Prism denotes unique features such as subcolumn, excluded values, floating notes, etc. is unique, so files can't be directly imported into other programs without some extra work.

An XML style sheet is appended to every XML file exported. That means you can view the file in a web browser, and see your data tables as tables. But don't be fooled by this. You are not viewing the XML file, you are viewing a rendition of the file as specified in a style sheet that is appended to every XML file Prism exports. To see what the file actually looks like, use a text editor.

We provide the XML schema in the Prism program folder (prism5xmlschema.xml). Using that (and by exporting sample files from Prism) a programmer could enable other programs to export data in Prism 5 XML format.

In addition to exporting data tables as XML, Prism can save an entire project in a new XML based file format (PZFX).