Use text format files for your data to make it available to other users or applications, if disk space and file I/O speed are not crucial, if you do not need to perform random access reads or writes, and if numeric precision is not important. To write data to a text file, use the String functions to convert all the data to text strings. Use the File I/O VIs and functions to read from or write to text files and to read from or write to spreadsheet files.
To save and view configuration preferences in applications as text files, use the configuration file VIs.