Various file formats offer diverse ways of storing and representing information. Depending on the format used, different applications and techniques may be necessary to open and manipulate these files. Here, we will explore five commonly used file extensions and elucidate the corresponding applications suitable to handle them.
PDF (.pdf)
The Portable Document Format (PDF) is renowned for its power in preserving the contents of a document, inclusive of its layout, design, colours, fonts, and graphics, among different systems and software. Adobe's Acrobat Reader (https://get.adobe.com/reader/) is the most common tool for opening PDF files. Besides the official software, tools like Foxit Reader (https://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf-reader/) and Google's Chrome Browser (https://www.google.com/chrome/) are capable of opening PDF documents.
JPEG (.jpeg)
JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) has become the standard for photograph and digital image files. Software like Adobe's Photoshop (https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop.html) and Lightroom (https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop-lightroom.html) are brilliant for editing JPEG files. Besides, basic photo viewers bundled with operating systems like Microsoft's Photos (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/microsoft-photos/) and Apple's Preview can open JPEG files.
MP3 (.mp3)
MP3 files are a universal standard for audio files. Most digital devices with sound capabilities play MP3 files. Widely known software include Apple's iTunes (https://www.apple.com/itunes/) for Apple users and VLC media player (https://www.videolan.org/vlc/) for Platform-independent usage.
Docx (.docx)
Docx is a document file format, commonly used by Microsoft office suites like Word (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/word). For non-Microsoft users, Google Docs (https://docs.google.com/) and OpenOffice (https://www.openoffice.org/) provide excellent cross-platform solutions for opening and editing Docx files.
CSV (.csv)
CSV stands for Comma-Separated Values, and it's a popular file format for tabular data. Microsoft Excel (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/excel) is one of the most common programs used to open and manipulate CSV files. Alternatively, Python programming language with pandas library (https://pandas.pydata.org/) provides effective means for CSV file manipulation.
Important Information
Understanding different file formats and the respective applications to use can ease your work with files. Although we have discussed only five formats, there exist thousands more. The right tools will not only let you open these files but offer options to edit and convert these files according to your needs.
