Text files that contain plain-text data are also known as ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) formatted files, a popular format based on the English alphabet. There are many advantages to saving data in ASCII format, such as allowing the data to be easily read and compatibility between other applications and operating systems.
One of the drawbacks of storing information in plain-text is that the format is not compressed, resulting in larger file sizes.
ASCII text files can be opened and created by the vast majority of text editors and word-processing applications (Notepad, Notepad ++, EditPad, Microsoft Word etc).
