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To explore text files in more detail we need an appropriate tool. After saving the file as text, we can see its content in Notepad: Obviously there's something more to learn about text files. Interesting things appear when we ask Word to save this as text file - there are a few questions to answer, some choices related to encoding and end of lines. Only when we ask MS Word to save this file as text (try it under Save As.) we get a text file per se. When we open the same file in Windows Notepad, dedicated for plain text, we see this: When opened in MS Word the file looks like this: To make things confusing, files we usually open and save in one of the most popular text editing program, MS Word, are actually not text files, but rather binary files containing text. Therefore, an understanding of their structure, types and quirks is essential for any biologist.

Text files (sometimes called also plain text) are commonly used for storing and exchanging between programs various types of information. The distinction between text and binary files may, at the beginning, seem a bit vague, but hopefully things will become clearer as we move on. The content of binary files, on the contrary, is not human readable, but to convey information meaningful for the user it has to be interpreted by a dedicated program (or run, if it's an executable file). Loosely speaking, text files contain lines of text, very little else, and are human readable.