Types of Computer Files

• There are two types of computer files--binary and text. Binary files contain code where characters are represented by 0's and 1's. Text files' code assigns a unique number to each letter, digit or symbol.
  
  

Code for Text Files

• ASCII, short for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is the code for text files. For example, the word "cat" in ASCII code would be shown as 63 61 74.
  
  

Advantages of Text Files

• Text files are commonly used for data storage since they contain minimal formatting and they are able to be opened and shared by most systems. Because of the simple text, if data becomes corrupt the system is able to recover and continue processing the remaining code.
  
  

Disadvantages of Text Files

• Due to the lack of formatting, .TXT files do not provide an easy-to-view user interface. Also, it is difficult for a user to hyperlink using ASCII code.
  
  

Conversion

• .TXT files can be converted to other extensions, such as .PDF and .XLS.