Import and Export: Collaboration with Other Software

Mathematica, with its flexible notebook document format, has long been a valuable tool for collaboration with colleagues. But Mathematica 4 puts a new emphasis on a different kind of collaboration: the sharing of data and information with other software on your computer. Mathematica 4 introduces the Import and Export commands, which provide a simple mechanism for importing and exporting data in many frequently used formats.

These functions also have counterparts, named ImportString and ExportString, which read and write to string buffers in memory rather than to files. Import and Export can determine the file formats needed by looking at the file name extension (although you can also denote them explicitly). For example, Mathematica knows to import an image with the file extension .tiff in TIFF format and export it in JPEG format.