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title: External Formats
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# External Formats

**Applies to:** ❌ Data 360 SQL ✅ Tableau Hyper API

Tableau Hyper API is able to read and write data stored in other commonly used data formats, called external formats or external data.

There are three orthogonal concepts for external formats.

- The data storage format (such as CSV or Parquet). The various formats provide different options, such as which character to use as the separator in CSV files. See [External Formats](https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/data/data-cloud-query-guide/references/dc-sql-reference/external-formats.md).
- The external file storage location (on the local file system, on S3) and corresponding options, such as the credentials for connecting to S3. See [External Locations](https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/data/data-cloud-query-guide/references/dc-sql-reference/external-location.md).
- The actions to take on the external data. For example, there are multiple syntactic options to [read external data](https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/data/data-cloud-query-guide/references/dc-sql-reference/external-syntax.md) or [write data](https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/data/data-cloud-query-guide/references/tableau-sql-commands/copy-to.md).