# Importing and Exporting Foreign Formats

&kspread; has a limited ability to import (read) and export (write) spreadsheet files with foreign formats. &kspread;'s capabilities at the time of writing are summarized in the table below, for more up to date information visit http://www.koffice.org/filters/status.phtml.

Format | Import | Export
Applix Spreadsheet | Beta | None
Comma Separated Values (CSV ) | Good | Good
dBase | Beta | None
Excel 97/2000 | Good | None
Gnumeric | Beta | Beta
HTML | None | Beta
Quattro Pro | Beta | None

To import a foreign file just load it as though it were a &kspread; native file with File Open....

To export a &kspread; file in a different format select File Save As... and select the format from the Filter: combo box. Although &kspread; automatically adds a `.ksp` extension to the names of files saved in its native format, you should add the correct extension for foreign formats.

## CSV Data

Tables of data are often held in text files with the values in a line being separated by a comma, space, tab or other character, for example 123, 456, 789, abcd, efgh. Such files are commonly called CSV (Comma Separated Values) files, even though the separating character may not be a comma.

If you ask &kspread; to open a text file it assumes that the file is in CSV format and launches a dialog box that allows you to specify the delimiter (separating character) used by the file, and shows how the data items will be placed into different spreadsheet cells.

Other options in this dialog box let you define the Format of the spreadsheet cells, whether text quote characters should be removed, and whether the first line(s) of the file should be ignored.