Extract text from CGL files
To convert your CGL file to another format, you need Microsoft Flight Simulator or other Game software.
To convert other file formats to the "Simulation Scenery Data" file type, you need software like Microsoft Flight Simulator or a similar tool.
The .CGL extension is a classic example of a "chameleon" filename used by completely different industries, creating significant confusion for users trying to open one.
Most commonly, a .CGL file is a Flight Simulator Scenery File used by Microsoft Flight Simulator. These act as proprietary containers for texture and geospatial data needed to render virtual landscapes. The friction here is high: these files are essentially "locked" to the simulator. They cannot be opened by standard image viewers or 3D editors like Blender, making them useless for editing without specialized extraction tools.
However, a significant number of users encounter .CGL files in academic or research settings as CogLab Data Files from Cengage. These contain raw cognitive psychology experiment results. The problem? The data is trapped in a niche format that Microsoft Excel cannot natively read. For analysis, these strictly need to be converted into CSV or XLSX formats.
Finally, the most frustrating scenario involves dashcams and apps like Telegram. Some hardware and software use .CGL as a "wrapper" or simple obfuscation for standard media. In these cases, the file is actually just a PNG image or MP4 video with the wrong label. Standard players will reject the file due to the extension mismatch.
Convert.Guru analyzes your CGL file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.
Users also converted INO, GVP, FLAGS and GAU files.
If you want to convert CGL file to CSV, JSON, XML, YAML, YML, TOML, INI, CFG, CONF, DAT, DB or SQL, you can use Microsoft Flight Simulator or similar software from the "Flight Simulator Scenery Data" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….
To convert DBF, XML, SQLITE, XLSX, SQL, TSV, ACCDB, YAML, MDB, CSV, ODS or JSON files to CGL, try Microsoft Flight Simulator or another comparable tool in the "Flight Simulator Scenery Data" category.
The history of Convert.Guru began over 25 years ago in California with Tom Simondi’s file-format database. A former contributor to Space Shuttle development and a software pioneer of the 1980s, Simondi established a trusted resource for file type analysis that was even referenced by Microsoft Windows XP. Today, we use modern technology to process and convert thousands of file formats while continually improving our CGL converter.