Is there any free DBF file converter?

Question

I have only found trial versions of these converters. Does anyone know a free one? Any of the following target formats will do:

CSV, MDB, SQL, XLS

DBF as in ESRI Shapefiles (SHP), probably the same as dBase II — Jader Dias, Aug 10 '09 at 20:32
There's a very high probability the command line tool ogr2ogr (part of the gdal ogr utilities) can also perform this for you as it reads/writes almost all common GIS formats. — ChristopheD, Aug 10 '09 at 22:05
Related: [Is there any free tool to convert a file with more than 65000 registers from DBF format to CSV?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1018777/) — Piotr Dobrogost, Oct 05 '12 at 11:42
qgis can do this pretty easily. Just open the file with qgis, right click the layer and save as a csv — boulder_ruby, Mar 21 '16 at 16:52

score 21 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 10 '10 at 18:10

21

Microsoft Excel can open DBF files and save it on many formats

answered Feb 10 '10 at 18:10

Jader Dias

88,211
155
421
625

1

Note that with an older MS-Excel version you might run into troubles with more than 65535 records... – Roalt Sep 03 '10 at 12:55
@Roalt Yes, that's true for Excel 2003 and older – Jader Dias Sep 03 '10 at 17:56
1

Also, Excel tends to corrupt the dbase files if you change and save them. – dummzeuch Feb 13 '11 at 11:29
2

At least Mac Excel 2011 doesn't open it. The OGR2OGR tool works and is the correct answer to this question. – jjrv Feb 01 '13 at 06:04
Excel may export some cells as empty which contain special characters. – Daniel Apr 14 '16 at 12:00
Excel also doesn't export Memo type. – Daniel Apr 14 '16 at 12:07
Plus. Excel isn't a "free" solution. – PaoloCargnin Feb 07 '17 at 16:29
2017 Microsoft Excel for Mac doesn't want to open .dbf file formats. – Joshua Pinter Dec 15 '17 at 05:31

score 11 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 10 '09 at 20:34

11

There's Exportizer (http://www.vlsoftware.net/exportizer/index.html) which also comes with a $$$$ "Pro" version, and DBF Viewer Plus (http://www.alexnolan.net/software/dbf.htm) by Alex Nolan.

Both are freeware, both should allow you to export to at least CSV (or more).

Marc

answered Aug 10 '09 at 20:34

marc_s

732,580
175
1,330
1,459

For anyone else interested: Exportizer is great for just peeking into a database and not doing anything real useful and seems pretty solid. DBF Viewer Plus seemed OK but I ran into a lot of bugs when trying to create tables and fields in those tables. Since I'm looking in on a database that I don't want to screw up, I will not be using that one and just sticking with Exportizer. – ScottN Aug 20 '15 at 15:28

score 9 · Answer 3 · answered Jan 01 '12 at 21:44

9

I am able to open and convert .dbf files with LibreOffice 3.4.4, and export to a variety of formats.

answered Jan 01 '12 at 21:44

Keith Flower

4,032
25
16

1

This is a very underrated answer. Free and simple! – CK1 Feb 15 '19 at 20:43
This answer helped me a lot. MS Excel and SQL Server only read a part of my dbf file (2000 out of 2800 records). LibreOffice didn't have any problems. It worked well even with Latin2 encoding in dbf file. – GigaKatowice Aug 26 '19 at 07:32

score 3 · Answer 4 · edited Oct 05 '12 at 16:15

3

http://sourceforge.net/projects/dbf2csv

Very simply converter between dbf and csv. You don't need any database engine.

Very simple, but worked fine for me

edited Oct 05 '12 at 16:15

j0k

22,600
28
79
90

answered Sep 26 '12 at 21:29

1234ru

692
8
16

That converter messes up the header, especially if there is field size in header (DBASE). – Jovica Mar 17 '14 at 17:23
Github project here: https://github.com/akadan47/dbf2csv – Joshua Pinter Dec 15 '17 at 15:46

score 2 · Answer 5 · answered Aug 10 '09 at 20:18

2

I wrote an article some years ago, about converting dbf's into datasets (xml readable by DataSet.ReadXml's function), however, it can be slow on big dbf's ,you can try it free though.

Article.

answered Aug 10 '09 at 20:18

Jhonny D. Cano -Leftware-

17,663
14
81
103

score 2 · Answer 6 · answered Aug 10 '09 at 20:19

2

A search on Sourceforge yields some possibilities:

answered Aug 10 '09 at 20:19

ChristopheD

112,638
29
165
179

score 2 · Answer 7 · answered Aug 10 '09 at 20:23

2

For XLS or CSV, use OpenOffice.org.

answered Aug 10 '09 at 20:23

maxwellb

13,366
2
25
35

The first row will be field names, followed by type abbreviation, field width (if applicable), and decimal places (if applicable). There's probably an option to turn off this behavior. In the mean time if you have MS Excel, it defaults to not adding this information into the first row cells. – maxwellb Aug 10 '09 at 20:28

Is there any free DBF file converter?

7 Answers7