Rave can read .txt .csv and .xls files. The file must be formatted as a "flat file database," which simply means it has the variable names in the first row, and data records in all remaining rows. Each column must be separated by a comma or tab (or be separate columns in Excel), and each row of the file must have the same number of columns. If data is missing, it should be listed as "nan", not simply left blank. If Excel files contain multiple worksheets, only the first worksheet will be loaded. Rave does not support the new .xlsx Excel files. (Save As Excel 97 format to make a file that is compatible with Rave).

Excel files take longer to load that plain text files, so if you're working with large data sets you might want to use .txt files.

Note: Rave currently loads data files using the built-in MATLAB function "importdata". So if you're having trouble getting a file to load, you can attempt to directly use it with importdata in MATLAB to diagnose the problem.