fixed-width text - Generic space-delimited, fixed-width ASCII file best viewed in a web browser or text editor window.

Caution: the text-output format is based on the SAS print procedure, which adds a header and variable list row every 32,767 lines (set at maximum page size), and thus this output format does not work well as an import file for large extracts. The comma- and tab-delimited text format options do not have the extra header lines and are better formats for importing.

comma-delimited text - Most common format for import into other software packages; best format for use with Microsoft Excel.

tab-delimited text - Common format for import into other software packages; alternative to comma-delimited if values contain commas.

dBase file - Convenient format supported by many software packages; used to import and export data among different database and spreadsheet programs.
TO OPEN IN MS ACCESS: The file name must have no more than 8 characters.

SAS dataset (2 formats) - The Windows_32 format is viewable with the free SAS System Viewer for Windows and is the native format for PC-SAS. The Solaris_64 format is native to the WRDS operating system and is not viewable by the SAS System Viewer, but is readable by PC-SAS as a "foreign" dataset. Both are version 9 datasets and have the same level of precision. Both are compatible with newer versions of Stat/Transfer and DBMS/Copy.

SAS transport file (PROC CPORT) - SAS portable file format for porting data sets among different operating systems.

SAS transport file (PROC COPY) - Older SAS portable file format for porting data sets among different operating systems; compatible with STAT/TRANSFER for STATA.  Note, if your web query includes variables with names longer than 8 characters, this format will fail.

HTML table - Tabled format easily read by Microsoft Excel; use only with very small data sets; best viewed in web browser window.

Stata dataset - A Stata version 8 dataset. Until further notice, please be aware of the problem with special missing values. See Using STATA with WRDS for more information.

SPSS dataset - An SPSS dataset with variable names truncated to 8 characters, and character values no longer than 256 characters.