Load Window
The Load Window is used for loading tables from an external location
(e.g. disk or URL) into TOPCAT. It is obtained using the
Load Table button () in the
Control Window toolbar or File menu.
This dialogue allows you to specify a new table to open in several
different ways, described below.
If you perform a successful load using any of these options,
a new entry or entries will be added into the Table List in the Control Window,
which you can then use in the usual ways.
If you choose a location which can't be turned into a table
(for instance because the file doesn't exist),
a window will pop up telling you what went wrong.
If you get an OutOfMemoryError
while loading a table,
you will have to run TOPCAT with more memory, as described in
Section 10.2.2 or use the -disk
flag described in
Section 10.1.
In the simplest case, you can type a name into the
Location field and hit return or the OK
button. This location can be a filename or a URL,
possibly followed by a '#
' character and a
'fragment identifier' to indicate where in the file or URL the table is
located; the details of what such fragment identifiers mean can be
found in the relevant subsection within Section 4.1.1.
Allowed URL types are described in Section 4.2.
You should select the relevant table format from the
Format selector box - you can leave it on
(auto) for loading FITS tables or VOTables,
but for other formats such as ASCII or CSV you must select the right one
explicitly (again, see Section 4.1.1 for details).
There are many other ways of loading tables however, described in the following subsections. The Filestore Browser and System Browser buttons are always visible below the location field. Depending on startup options, there may be other buttons here. There are also a number of toolbar buttons which display various load dialogues; the DataSources contains all of these along with some lesser-used ones. The following subsections describe most of the available options, though others may be available in your installation.
The options available on the toolbar by default are these: