Import and export of data is a useful feature for modelling software. It allows decoupling of user roles, so that people dealing with data collection can work independently (more or less) of people running simulations and of people concerned with analysis of results.
It also makes it possible for pre-processing or post-processing to be applied using other software - a sophisticated 3D model could be used for atmospheric transport from a source of contamination to the investigated region, MERLIN-Expo calculates the total exposure to the population and a MATLAB script performs statistical analysis on the results.
MERLIN-Expo supports export and import of results in binary format, to tab-separated text files and to Microsoft Excel (or other software that can read/write Excel files). For input data the only supported format is Microsoft Excel, as Excel is the most common tool used by people in this field.