ANY-maze Help > The ANY-maze reference > Working with files and reports > Saving reports and data > Saving data
Saving data
Overview
You can save the spreadsheet shown on the Data page by selecting the 
Save button in the Data page's ribbon bar, or by right clicking anywhere in the spreadsheet and selecting 
Save to file... from the menu that appears.
Doing this will cause the Save data window to be displayed, where you can specify a name and location for the file and choose the format it should be saved in.
| • | The 'Save data' window |
| • | Formats in which data can be saved |
| • | Saving just part of the spreadsheet |
The Save data window
You will probably be familiar with the Save data window already, as it's based on the standard 'save' window used in almost all Windows software.
 | It's often very useful to enlarge this window so you can see more files. You can do this by dragging the bottom right corner with the mouse. |
Figure 1. The Save data window.
| Files list | The files list shows the folders and files of the selected type (see Save as type, below) stored in the current location. You can double click a folder to open it, or you can click a file to transfer its name to the File name field. |
| File name | Use this field to enter a name for the file. You can enter up 255 characters, but your entry can't contain any of the following characters: \ / : * ? " < > |. |
| Save as type | You can save data in a number of different formats, and you should choose the one you wish to use from the list displayed here. The formats themselves are described in detail below. |
Formats in which data can be saved
| Symbolic link format | Symbolic link format (also known as SYLK format) was designed by Microsoft for transfer of data between spreadsheet programs. As you'd expect, it's supported in many spreadsheet programs, most notably Excel. Saving data in SYLK format has the advantage that formatting (such as fonts and column widths) is preserved. |
| Comma-separated values | The Comma-separated values format (also known as CSV format) is widely used by spreadsheet and database programs. The disadvantage of this format is that formatting is lost. |
| dBase III/IV format | dBase format was developed for use with the once popular dBase database program. As this program was once the de facto standard database, almost all database and statistics programs support this format. This is definitely the best format to use if you want to manipulate ANY-maze data using a program like Microsoft Access (although this format is only supported in versions of Access up to Access 2010). |
| Tab-separated format | Tab-separated format is another common data format, and is also widely supported by spreadsheet and database programs. In this case, the file will be saved with a .txt extension so, when reading the file, you should select an option to 'Open a text file'. |
In fact, apart from the different file extensions, the only real difference between tab- and comma-separated formats is (as the names imply) the fact that in one there are commas between each value, whereas in the other the values are separated by tabs.
Saving just part of your data
It's easy to save just a part of the Data page spreadsheet, for example just a particular group of cells, or just a certain number of rows - the techniques for doing this are described in the Selecting cells, columns or rows topic.
More details
For more details on saving and copying data from the Data page, see Copying and saving data from the Data page.
© Copyright 2003-2026 Stoelting Co. All rights reserved
ANY-maze help topic T0991