Mass Frontier allows the saving and opening of references to records with the extension *.ref , present in the Database Manager spreadsheet. This feature is especially useful for maintaining groups of spectra that are sent from Database Manager to the Spectra Classifier window. If you have retrieved spectra for classification, it is useful to save these records as references, rather then save the spectra as ASCII files (JCAMP or MSP). In contrast to JCAMP or MSP files, a reference file stores the locations, where all the relevant information about each spectrum is saved (spectrum, structure, experimental conditions etc.). In addition reference files are easy to manipulate, you can add or remove one or more records to them. Deconvoluted spectra from Chromatogram Processor cannot be saved as references.