SHOALS files (generic ASCII tabular files) were named for the SHOALS group with the US Army Corps of Engineers. SHOALS files are opened through the Open File Wizard. Any ASCII tabular file can be opened through the wizard by renaming the file to have a .pts extension.
SHOALS files may have a file header, which is skipped when the file is opened. The columns of data follow the header and may be delimited by any character (such as TAB, SPACE, COMMA, etc).
SHOALS files are opened through File | Open and saved from File | Save As... from the Mesh or Scatter modules.