Compatibility of files

PRIMER 7 is fully forward-compatible from v6, and can input PRIMER 6, 5 and 4 data (*.pri and *.pm1), similarity (*.sid and *.sim) and aggregation (*.agg and *.pm1) files, and PRIMER 6 plot (*.ppl) and workspace (*.pwk) files, directly. But it is not, in general, backward-compatible so that PRIMER 6 cannot read workspaces, plot or data files saved in v7 format – there are many new plotting routines in PRIMER 7 that require additional internal data and graphic storage structures, workspaces from v7 in the earlier v6 format; little is lost with *.pri data files but, when such workspaces are re-opened in v6 (or v7), plot formats which are new to v7 will not be present, clearly. In addition, PRIMER 7 recognises several standard Windows extensions, e.g. input and output of *.xls(x) (Excel) and *.txt (text) data files or resemblance matrices; also *.csv, comma-separated text input. There are several options for *.txt text-format data input. Results windows can be saved in *.txt or *.rtf (rich-text) formats. PRIMER 7 can output plots to standard bitmap formats (*.bmp, *.jpg, *.png, *.tif, *.gif). An image in one of these formats can also be input to v7 (though with only minor use, as an image in an MDS bubble plot). Most usefully, plots can be output as vector-based enhanced metafiles (*.emf), and Copy and Paste operations from Graph windows in PRIMER to Microsoft Office routines (e.g. Powerpoint) are of this type, so plots can be ungrouped into Office drawing objects and further manipulated. PRIMER 7 also introduces some animation options, e.g. for spinning 3-d ordination plots, which can be output as movie files (*.mp4) or animated GIF (*.gif). All other file types (extensions) are not recognised.