DATA File Documentation

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Technical details

Feature	Value
Documented name	Analysis Studio Offline Data File
File extension	.data
Creator application	Appricon Analysis Studio (data-mining / statistics, Windows)
MIME type	text/plain
Format type	Plain-text, tab-delimited data export
Category	Data Files
Companion file	.stp — schema/metadata (column definitions, project info)
Encoding	ASCII / UTF-8 text; columns separated by TAB
Magic number	None — plain text, no binary signature
Open standard	No (application-defined layout)
Typical data source	Rows imported from MS Access or SQL Server, saved locally for offline use
Safe to delete	Only if you no longer need the offline dataset; keep the paired .stp with it
Extension is generic?	Yes — also used by unrelated caches, ML datasets and game assets
Related extensions	.stp, .dat, .csv, .txt
Developer	Appricon Ltd.

What is a .data file?

There is no single “DATA format”. .data is a short, generic extension that many unrelated programs reuse for their own purposes, so the honest first answer to “what is this file?” is: it depends entirely on which program wrote it. A .data file can be an application’s opaque cache or save, a machine-learning training set, a game or engine asset blob, or a plain text export — and these have nothing in common beyond the four letters after the dot.

The specific, documented use this page covers is the Analysis Studio Offline Data File created by Appricon Analysis Studio, a Windows data-mining and statistical-analysis application. That kind of .data file is plain text laid out as tab-delimited rows, and it is always paired with a companion .stp file that holds the project schema. Because the extension is generic, the practical skill is telling which sort of .data you have, so this article starts there and then covers the Analysis Studio case in detail.

How to tell what your .data file really is

Before choosing a tool, identify the file. Two quick checks settle most cases. First, look at where it came from: a .data sitting in a program’s install or cache folder is almost certainly that program’s private data and is only meaningful to it, whereas one you exported from Analysis Studio (and which has a same-named .stp next to it) is the tab-delimited text type. Second, open it in a plain text editor and look at the first bytes. If you see rows of readable values separated by tabs, it is text you can import into a spreadsheet. If you see a run of non-printable bytes or a recognisable signature (for example PK for a ZIP, or \x89PNG), it is a binary file — possibly a renamed known format — and needs the application that created it, or a hex viewer to identify by its header. Because .data overlaps heavily with the equally generic .dat extension, the same identify-by-origin-and-header workflow applies to both.

The Analysis Studio .data and its .stp companion

Analysis Studio stores its offline working data as a .data file that is plain text in a tab-delimited layout: each record is a row, and columns within a row are separated by a TAB character. It does not keep the column definitions in the same file. Those live in a separate .stp file — the project schema and metadata, describing the columns, object information and project context — that sits alongside the .data. The two files are a pair: the .data holds the values, the .stp tells the program what those values mean. The rows themselves are often pulled from an external source such as a Microsoft Access or SQL Server database and then saved locally as this .data/.stp pair so the analysis can run offline.

Two consequences follow. First, to work with the full project you should open the .data inside Analysis Studio, so it loads together with its .stp schema and the columns are labelled correctly. Second, the .stp is a companion, not a conversion target: you cannot turn a .data into a .stp or vice versa, and separating the two loses the schema. Keep them together when you copy or archive the project.

Opening the tab-delimited data in Excel or LibreOffice

Because the payload is plain tab-delimited text, you do not strictly need Analysis Studio to read the numbers. Any text editor (Notepad++, TextEdit) shows the raw rows, and a spreadsheet imports them into columns. In Excel the route is Data > From Text/CSV; in LibreOffice Calc the import dialog appears when you open the file. The one recurring snag is the header. An Analysis Studio .data file carries header/metadata rows before the actual records, so if you let a spreadsheet auto-detect the layout the columns come out misaligned. The fix is explicit: choose the Tab delimiter, and tell the import wizard to skip the header rows so the first data row lands in row one. Once it imports cleanly you can Save As CSV or XLSX for use elsewhere, or run a small script (Python’s pandas, say) to emit JSON. What you lose by reading it this way is the schema context from the .stp; for that, use the native application.

Is a .data file safe to open or delete?

An Analysis Studio .data file is plain tab-delimited text. It contains no executable code and is safe to open and inspect in a text editor or spreadsheet. The only real caution is about the contents, not the file type: it may hold sensitive records pulled from a database, so convert or clean it locally rather than uploading it to an online “data converter”. Whether it is safe to delete depends on which .data you have. An offline Analysis Studio dataset can be removed once you no longer need that local copy — but delete the paired .stp with it, since one is useless without the other. A .data file that belongs to another program’s cache or save is safe to delete only if that program does not need it; when in doubt, move it aside rather than deleting, and see whether anything breaks. Because .data is generic, never assume a deletion is harmless without first identifying which application owns the file.

References

• Appricon — Analysis Studio (data-mining software)
• File-Extension.info — DATA format overview

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