Records and finance

Bank statements ofx qfx qif sta mt940, ISO 20022 statements and payments in .xml, books gnucash beancount bean ledger hledger journal, financial reports xbrl and inline XBRL pages, event logs evtx journal, bibliographies bib bibtex ris nbib medline ciw enwrefer

Files that are lists of records — a transaction, an event, a reference — open as their table, a row a record, read by the app's own engine. The same column summaries and SQL as a parquet file work on them: a bank statement and a csv of receipts join in one query.

A file that holds several kinds of record opens as the list of its tables, as an SQLite file does. A double click opens one on its Table, and the notebook queries it by its name after the file's path: SELECT * FROM 'books/home.beancount/postings'. Opened from its Table mode, such a file shows the table of the most rows.

Which format a file is, its content decides: an ISO 20022 statement named .xml, an hledger journal named .journal, a PubMed export named .txt all open as themselves. The text of the ones written as text is a click away.

Bank statements and payments

ISO 20022 is the international standard for messages between banks and their customers; SWIFT (the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) is the network banks send theirs over.

File	A row for each
OFX (Open Financial Exchange) ofx, Quicken's qfx	transaction, with its account
Quicken's interchange file qif	transaction
SWIFT MT940, the statement banks send over SWIFT, sta mt940	statement line, with its statement
ISO 20022 camt.052, camt.053, camt.054 statements, .xml	tables: entries, details, balances, statements
ISO 20022 pain.001 payment orders, .xml	tables: payments, instructions

OFX versions 1 (SGML, XML's forerunner) and 2 (XML) are both read; Microsoft Money writes the same. An amount is a number, signed as the bank books it, and a date is a date.

Books and journals

File	Its tables
GnuCash book gnucash (XML, compressed or not)	splits, transactions, accounts, prices, commodities
Beancount ledger beancount bean	postings, transactions, accounts, balances, prices
Ledger and hledger journals ledger hledger journal	postings, transactions, prices

A posting carries its transaction's number, date and description, so the postings table alone answers most questions. An amount the journal leaves out is filled in, as Ledger and Beancount would balance it. A GnuCash book saved as SQLite is an SQLite file, and opens as its own tables.

A .journal is told by its bytes: a systemd journal opens as its log entries, an hledger journal as its tables.

Financial reports

An XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) report — .xbrl, or an .xml whose root says so — opens as its facts, a row each: the concept, its value, its period, its unit and its dimensions. An inline XBRL page, the .htm a company files with the SEC (the US Securities and Exchange Commission), opens as the web page it is, its facts on its Table next.

Event logs

File	A row for each
Windows event log evtx	event: provider, event id, level, time, computer, its data
systemd journal journal, journal~	entry, as journalctl -o json writes it

A Windows event's own data is a column of JSON, a member a field. A journal's fields are a column each, and a payload compressed with LZ4, Zstandard or XZ is read. A log cut short reads as far as it goes.

Bibliographies

File	A row for each
BibTeX bib bibtex	entry: its type and key, a column a field
RIS (Research Information Systems) ris: EndNote, Zotero, Mendeley	reference, a column a tag
PubMed's MEDLINE format nbib medline	citation, a column a tag
Web of Science plain text ciw	record, a column a tag
EndNote tagged and Refer enw refer	reference, a column a tag

A tag given more than once, as each author is, keeps its values in one column, joined by ; .

A browser's history and bookmarks open as tables too — see mail, chats and personal files.

Next: databases.