CDF file format is an electronic document format used for creating interactive content. The CDF file format is created for easy generation of interactive document type.

This file format is similar to that of PDF based documents but instead of being static in case of PDF, the CDF file has GUI based elements including sliders, buttons and menus. The user interaction on the CDF file forces the embedded computation to be updated according to the interaction. This is an additional feature of the CDF file format that it has an embedded computational code which allows the document to interact to the user feedback.