File Formats and Importing

Conspecta reads the formats your instruments already produce, in the browser, with nothing to install. This page lists what each workspace opens, what it writes, and the formats it doesn't handle today.

What Conspecta Opens

In every one of them you can drag files onto the empty workspace instead of finding an import button.

Images dropped into the body of a note are a separate list. PNG, JPEG, and BMP go in as they are, and a TIFF is converted to a PNG of its first page so the browser can display it.

Opening a LIF File

A Leica Image File (.lif) holds a whole session: several series, each with its own z-slices, channels, timepoints, and tiles. Conspecta reads it in your browser, seeking through the file rather than loading it whole, so a multi-gigabyte acquisition uploads without a desktop converter in the middle.

What arrives is the imagery, structured: every series becomes an image you can open, with its slices and channels intact and its channel names preserved, which is what makes colocalization and marker classification possible. The original .lif container isn't kept, since everything inside it is.

The limits are 5 GB per LIF, 100 MB per ordinary image, and 200 files per upload. Keep the tab open while a large upload runs, because the parsing happens on your machine.

Opening an FCS File

Conspecta supports FCS 3.0, 3.1, and 3.2, checking the file's own checksum on FCS 3.1. An FCS 2.0 file still opens, but some of its legacy encodings can be misread, so Conspecta flags it when you upload one. Parameters, keywords, cytometer name, acquisition date, tube and well identifiers, and any embedded spillover matrix all come across, so an analysis can offer to apply the cytometer's own compensation.

Files stored with ASCII rather than binary data aren't supported.

A gated population exports back out as a real FCS file, with the gate's name written into the file's keywords, so a population you defined here opens correctly anywhere else.

Sequence Files

FASTA and GenBank both import, several files and several records at a time. A GenBank record brings its annotations and its topology, which is what tells Conspecta a plasmid is circular and should open as a plasmid map.

You can skip files entirely and fetch by accession from NCBI or UniProt, or paste a sequence and let Conspecta detect whether it's DNA, RNA, or protein.

Not supported today: binary SnapGene files (.dna), chromatograms (.ab1), EMBL, FASTQ, and GFF3. Export the sequence as GenBank or FASTA from the tool that made it, and that will import cleanly.

Spreadsheets

Data Tables import CSV, TSV, and Excel, one table per file, named from the filename. Large sheets are parsed off the main thread and uploaded in chunks, so a few thousand rows is unremarkable.

Excel formulas survive the import. Conspecta keeps and recomputes the functions it supports, and preserves the rest exactly as written with the value they arrived with, rather than guessing. A banner on the table explains which happened.

For samples and inventory, a CSV import matches column headers loosely, including the header names other lab tools export, so a spreadsheet from elsewhere usually maps without editing.

Formats Conspecta Doesn't Read

Being direct about this saves you an upload:

• Microscopy: .czi (Zeiss), .nd2 (Nikon), OME-TIFF, and whole-slide formats (.svs, .ndpi, .mrxs, .vsi, .scn) are not supported. Export to TIFF from your acquisition software.
• Images: GIF, WebP, and SVG are rejected on upload.
• Sequences: the binary and trace formats listed above.
• Video: not supported as an image source.

What Conspecta Writes

Your data leaves in formats other tools read:

Exports are free and never count against compute usage. Share and export covers the whole-project backup.