ParaView/Users Guide/Loading Data

Introduction

Loading data is a fundamental operation in using ParaView for visualization. As you would expect, the Open option from the File menu and the the Open Button from the toolbar both allow you to load data into ParaView. The list of supported file formats for ParaView can be found on the List Of Readers. Because of ParaView's modular design it is easy to integrate new VTK readers so check beck every release for new supported file formats. If you are interested in creating new readers for ParaView see the HowTo

ParaView can process both structured and unstructured data sets. It also has some support for multi-block and time-varying data. These data sets can be read into ParaView from several different file formats, some of which ParaView also uses for saving data to a file.

File Open Dialog

State Files

Another option is to load a previously saved state file (File menu, Load State). This will return ParaView to its state at the time the file was saved by loading data files, applying filters.

Advanced Data Loading

If you commonly load the same data into ParaView each time, you can streamline the process by launching ParaView with the data command-line argument (--data=data_file). You can also launch ParaView