Sofia,

The data in the file evidently has nested data that comes in as a list.

let's make something up:

data = {{a1, {bxx, byy, bzz, buu, bvv}, {cxx, cyy, czz, cuu, 
    cvv}, d1} , b, c}

data[[1]] gives the first element in the list (ignoring the b and c elements (which also could have been lists)

{a1, {bxx, byy, bzz, buu, bvv}, {cxx, cyy, czz, cuu, cvv}, d1}

next

data[[1,2;;-2]]

gives the second item and all items up to the second to last item in the result above:

{{bxx, byy, bzz, buu, bvv}, {cxx, cyy, czz, cuu, cvv}}

and once again they take the second item and all items up to the second to last item:

I made a confusing typo in my first edit of this post --

When you have a span, the next part range applies to each of the elements in the span:

In[4]:= data[[1, 2 ;; -2, 2 ;; -2]]

Out[4]= {{byy, bzz, buu}, {cyy, czz, cuu}}

This is useful for matrix operations. For example, if you want to take one column of a matrix you can use data[[1,All]] to get every item in the matrix

I hope this helps.

Regards,

Neil