Picalo can load data from a variety of text files.  These data come into Picalo as tables.  You can work with them immediately, or you can push them up to a relational database.  As of 2010, Picalo imports the following types of files:

• Delimited text files like Comma Separated Values (CSV), Tab Separated Values (TSV), and others.
• Fixed width files from legacy systems.  The import wizard provides a visual way to delimit where fields start and stop: just click with your mouse to denote a new field.
• MS Excel spreadsheets in the traditional .xls format.  The new .xlsx is not supported.
• Email files in both Maildir and Mbox formats.  If you need to read proprietary systems like Exchange, simply convert the .pst files (which contains user email files) to Maildir format using one of the many free tools available online.

Picalo works with many different file encodings, including ASCII, EBCDIC, and the many Unicode encodings.