What Is the Definition of Text Data?

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name's Dave Andrews, and today I'm going to tell you about text data. Now, the definition of text data is data that is stored in ASCII characters on the hard drive. Now, what does that mean? ASCII is a a standard set of characters for computers that would represent a text and text only. This would be characters like a, b, c, and on, capital A, B, C. It could be symbols, stars, parentheses, things like that, but the fact of the matter is it is not binary data that is representing an arbitrary number. It is data that represents text and text only, and I'm going to show you on the computer the difference. I have two files here. One is a text file, and the other is a spreadsheet. If I open up this file, the text file, you can see that this is some basic text. Now, this is actual text data. These characters; this is some basic text, are stored on the hard drive as text and not as binary data that has to be parsed into text. So basically, each of these characters is stored individually on the hard drive, and represents only the character that it will actually show up as when I open it. The spreadsheet is different. If I open up this spread sheet here as you can see I've typed in the text, This is textual, but not text based data, and the reason it is not text based data is because the open Office that I have it opened with; when it saves it it will save it as binary data, and then when it opens up that binary data it'll just pull out the text data and show it on the screen. So, this text data is not saved precisely in the way that it appears here. And if I try to open that with this text based editor you can see here; I'm going to open it with our text editor that I just opened the other file with, and as you can see it's tellin' me that it cannot even open the file. That's because it is a a binary file, and not a text based file. My name's Dave Andrews, and I've just talked to you about text based data."