Friday, May 2, 2014

Indefinite article before "format"

I need to use this word with the following meaning:




the way in which data is stored or held to be worked on by a computer




This particular dictionary doesn't say anything about whether this word is countable or not. The given example though contains an indefinite article:




The images are stored in a digital format within the database.





So, it is supposed to be a countable noun. But when I reviewed some other examples I've discovered that putting an indefinite article along with the noun is not always the case:




However, neither the raw nor the processed data were provided in digital format.



No data were reported in digital format.





Could you please clarify the cases for me?

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