Importing and Exporting Activities and Courses

File Formats

GPX

This format is pretty straightforward and supported by pretty much everything as it is an open standard (free for everyone to use). The contents of the file is text, so it can be edited fairly easily, and uses XML, like many of these formats. These files have one or more "tracks" that are named and are made up of segments, which have points. Each point has the latitude and longitude and optionally the elevation, time and even extensions including heart rate data.

A lot of web sites and programs can be quite fussy about the data that is included in a GPX file, such as Garmin Connect, which will fail if elevation and time data is not provided.

For more info, go to http://www.topografix.com/gpx.asp.

TCX

This format is specific to Garmin, so is not as widely supported, but will sometimes provide more data if you export to this rather than GPX, handy when bringing data across from one web site to another.

KML

Also known as Google Earth format, this format is an international standard, largely used by Google so it has become fairly wide-spread. This is the format Avenza PDF Maps requires for importing courses. It can provide a lot more than lines / routes, so not all KML files will be suitable for import as they can contain different types of data. Anything exported from a course or activity should be fine though.

Garmin Connect

Exporting

Exporting an activity is quite simple but does require you to be logged in. Creating an account is free and doesn't require you to have a Garmin device, so do that if you need to first.

Classic Garmin Connect

Modern Garmin Connect

Once you've logged in, the 'Export' options should be available. You can export to TCX, GPX and Google Earth (KML) on both, but the modern version also allows you to export the original FIT data (that came from your watch) and splits to a CSV file (that can be viewed in Excel or similar).

Importing

Still to come...