Formats for Reports and Lists

Most of the reports provided to the public through PSTB's Web site are basic ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) text files and can be read by almost any personal computer. These text reports are also delimited. A delimited text file is one where information has been separated by a text value for the purpose of processing. In our reports,  field information is separated by tab values or fixed spaces. This makes it easy to import these reports into a another format, such as a  spreadsheet application or database. 

For example, you can import one of PSTB's text based reports by using the OPEN command on the FILE menu in Microsoft Excel. In the OPEN window make sure you change the File of Type: to Text File. You can also import a text file with the Import Data command (Get External Data submenu on the Data menu). When you import or open a text file in Excel the application displays the Text Import Wizard, which provides additional flexibility and options for deciding how to import the text file.

Companies and organizations who wish to provide documents that are easily downloaded from a Web site, but difficult to change or manipulate, often choose the Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) for 
sensitive material. Adobe PDF document have a ".pdf" extensions (example: report.pdf)

Many of PSTB's reports and documents are in Adobe PDF for integrity purposes. It is important that some or all of the information in these document be protected from user changes, both intended and unintentional.

The software products used to publish (make) PDF files is proprietary, created by Adobe Systems, Inc.  Software has to be purchased from Adobe to make Adobe PDF files, but the reader used but most users to open and view Adobe PDF files is FREE to almost everyone. If you do not have Adobe Reader installed on your computer, we encourage you to visit http://www.adobe.com to learn more about getting this product.  

Often a report or document is too large to be placed on our Web site for user download, or we wish a user to download an entire set of documents at once, instead of just one. In such cases, PSTB uses  a compression utility called WinZip to reduce the size of large files and store them in a single file. WinZip file have a ".zip" extension (example: reports.zip). Users who download WinZip files from our Web site need to unzip or extract the files before using them. This requires that users have WinZip installed on their computer or another utility that unzips WinZip files.

WinZip provides an evaluation (or trial) copy of the WinZip program at their Web site. If you don't have the WinZip software, we encourage you to visit http://www.winzip.com for further information.