Converting .ndv files into .csv (for the UV/Vis nanodrop spectrometers)

Thermo Scientific NanoDrop range of UV/Vis spectrophotometers (http://www.nanodrop.com/Absorbance.aspx) seem to be pretty good to me – apart from their terrible software.

I used the NanoDrop 1000 Spectrophotometer, and found the software to be so unintuitive that I had to read the entirety of the manual for the sections I used (which can be found at http://goo.gl/smXCT). The two main points I would note are:

• The data can be exported from the report - select ‘Show report’->‘Save report’->‘Full report’  which will save a .ndv file of all the spectra taken in the current session.
• The absorbance data at 0.2mm (NB on the report it is shown for 0.1mm so you can visually confirm it is a tenth of the 1mm absorbance, see the wikipedia page on the Beer-Lambert law for an explanation of this linearity) is stored in C:\NanoDrop Data\User name\ HiAbs – there is no other way to get to it.

The .ndv files saved are tab-delimited files which you can load into spreadsheet software to manipulate and plot. As I wanted to do further spectral analysis this was a bit useless to me, so I wrote a quick perl script to convert these files into a set of .csv files (one for each spectrum listed in the .ndv file).

(file no longer available)