Is there any file format standard for EEG data? I have started to do some research on EEG analysis. One of the challenging things I have found is the variability on the formats for the EEG files. 

What do you do when you receive data your software does not support? Is it reasonable to ask the collaborators to convert the data to another format? Do you modify your software to incorporate the details of the new format?

Is there any EEG format out there that is considered standard? Do the EEG manufacturers provide converters to that format in their software?

Thanks,

-drd
As far as I know, short answer is no - there is no gold standard for EEG files. But EEG is a time series (amplitude) from several channels. So the most common way to represent it is columns as electrodes and rows as points of time. I think almost all software is possible to read such structure as txt file. But EEG is not only time series. Usually it is important to have additional channel with event markers. It make the situation a little bit tricky. But usually popular software is able to read most of EEG data formats and it's not difficult to write a custom function for reading your data.