Question

Is it better to keep both? Chose one? What criteria would you use to select one over the other? If you had a button you had to name, rather than the menu to store this, would ‘Export is shorter than Save As’ be sufficient criteria to select one over the other? Edit: Would already having a File >> Save or a Save button influence your decision? I think my fear here is that saving to another name is implied in the As… bit.

Answer 1

No it is not redundant.

‘Save’ should be the primary way to save files in formats that don’t cause a significant loss / degradation of data.

I would use ‘Export’ for file formats where major loss of fidelity or information is expected (for example, exporting a spreadsheet to txt or csv).

Looking at the inverse operations (‘Open’ vs. ‘Import’) may be useful — I think ‘Open’ should be able to immediately read a file, while ‘Import’ may require specifying extra options for parsing it (e.g. marking columns or delimiters to use when getting a table from a txt file).

Export/Import may also imply partial/incomplete support for a format. When I use Save/Open, I’d expect to be able to use the format as the native one, with no loss of data ever.