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# 2.2. Converting between table formats

Orange Canvas has a “native” type for representing data tables, namely ExampleTable. However, this type does not support Unicode well, which is a serious limitation in the perspective of text processing. To overcome this issue (as much as possible), Orange Textable defines its own table representation format, simply called Table.

Every table construction widget in Orange Textable emits data in Table format. Instances of these widget must then be connected with an instance of Convert, which has mainly two purposes:

> - It converts data in Orange Textable’s Table format to the native ExampleTable format of Orange Canvas, which makes it possible to use the other widgets of Orange Canvas for visualizing, modifying, analyzing, etc. tables built with Orange Textable.
> - It exports data in Table format to text files, in tab-delimited format, typically in order to import them later in a third party data analysis software package; at the time of writing, this scenario is the only way to correctly visualize a table containing data encoded in Unicode.

As shown on figure 1 below, section Conversion of the widget’s interface lets the user choose the encoding of the ExampleTable object produced in output (Orange table encoding); variants of Unicode should be avoided here since they are currently not well supported by other widgets in Orange Canvas.

Figure 1: Basic interface of widget Convert.

The encoding for text file export can be selected in the Export section (Output file encoding); in this case there are no counter-indications to the use of Unicode. Checkbox Include Orange headers triggers inclusion of additional table headers in the case where the output file should be later re-imported in Orange Canvas. Export proper is performed by clicking the Export button and selecting the output file in the dialog that appears.

The take-home message here is this: when you create an instance of a table construction widget, you may systematically create a new instance of Convert and connect them together. Usually, moreover, you will want to connect the Convert instance to a Data Table instance (from the Data tab of Orange Canvas) in order to view the table just built–except in the case where it contains Unicode data that wouldn’t display correctly in Data table.

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