Turning to your favourite concrete beam design software to quickly whipping up a few designs helps us save time, but it may also cause some key issues down the line. One of the biggest problems here is the file format that is used to store the information used by these programs, with the biggest offender being cloud software (ie. you don’t even own the file itself).
What happens to your critical gravity/lateral designs when your software license expires? Or the company is shut down? Or even if you want to use some other software to do a side-by-side comparison?
A potential solution is to use a file format that’s lightweight, portable, and adaptable - plain text.
What is plain text? See the example above. Plain text is comprised of just regular, human-legible (and understandable) characters. It’s the foundation upon which much of the software world sits and will outlast any proprietary file format well into the future.