VOT Converter

Extract text from Virtual Observatory tables (VOT)


Drop or upload your .VOT file
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How to extract text from your VOT file

  1. Click the "Select File" button above, and choose your VOT file.
  2. You’ll see a preview, if available.
  3. Click the "Convert file to..." button to extract text information.

Convert VOT to another file type

To convert VOT tables to another format, you need TOPCAT or other Data software.

Convert a file to VOT

To convert other file formats to the "Astronomical Table Format" file type, you need software like TOPCAT or a similar tool.


About VOT files

A .VOT file is primarily a Virtual Observatory Table (VOTable), an XML-based format developed by the International Virtual Observatory Alliance to exchange tabular astronomical data. These files encapsulate rich metadata - such as measurement units, Unified Content Descriptors (UCDs), and coordinate systems - alongside the actual datasets. The data payload itself can be stored as plain XML text, Base64-encoded binary streams, or external data files. A secondary, less common use is for Video Object Tracking files associated with computer vision challenges. Astronomers and data scientists frequently use specialized software like TOPCAT or the STILTS package to manipulate .VOT files. The main disadvantage of this format is its extreme specialization. Standard spreadsheet editors like Excel will completely fail to parse the complex nested XML tags, leaving users frustrated with an unreadable mess. Furthermore, very large .VOT files often span gigabytes and will crash standard text editors. To make the data accessible in general-purpose software like Excel, R, or Pandas, you must convert the .VOT file to a standard CSV or JSON. Keep in mind that converting to a flat format like CSV will strip out the rich astronomical metadata. Because this is a niche scientific format, standard online converters usually fail to process it. Even if it contains embedded binary data, our analysis can often extract the raw text and underlying tabular structures.

Convert.Guru analyzes your VOT file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.

Users also converted CGP, RAW and TW files.


FAQ

If you want to convert VOT file to , you can use TOPCAT or similar software from the "Astronomical Data Table Storage" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….

To convert files to VOT, try TOPCAT or another comparable tool in the "Astronomical Data Table Storage" category.



The VOT Converter Story

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 VOT converter.