Is there any free DBF file converter? [closed]

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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

Heading answered 10/8, 2009 at 20:13 Comment(5)

DBF as in ESRI Shapefiles (SHP), probably the same as dBase II – Heading 10/8, 2009 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. – Heilman 10/8, 2009 at 22:5

Related: Is there any free tool to convert a file with more than 65000 registers from DBF format to CSV? – Diazotize 5/10, 2012 at 11:42

qgis can do this pretty easily. Just open the file with qgis, right click the layer and save as a csv – Inoculation 21/3, 2016 at 16:52

Github project here: github.com/akadan47/dbf2csv – Skill 15/12, 2017 at 15:46

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

Heading answered 10/2, 2010 at 18:10 Comment(8)

Note that with an older MS-Excel version you might run into troubles with more than 65535 records... – Vacate 3/9, 2010 at 12:55

@Vacate Yes, that's true for Excel 2003 and older – Heading 3/9, 2010 at 17:56

Also, Excel tends to corrupt the dbase files if you change and save them. – Sherwin 13/2, 2011 at 11:29

At least Mac Excel 2011 doesn't open it. The OGR2OGR tool works and is the correct answer to this question. – Bruns 1/2, 2013 at 6:4

Excel may export some cells as empty which contain special characters. – Antonantone 14/4, 2016 at 12:0

Excel also doesn't export Memo type. – Antonantone 14/4, 2016 at 12:7

Plus. Excel isn't a "free" solution. – Tarbes 7/2, 2017 at 16:29

2017 Microsoft Excel for Mac doesn't want to open .dbf file formats. – Skill 15/12, 2017 at 5:31

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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

Balladry answered 10/8, 2009 at 20:34 Comment(1)

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. – Hectorhecuba 20/8, 2015 at 15:28

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

Psalms answered 1/1, 2012 at 21:44 Comment(2)

This is a very underrated answer. Free and simple! – Poock 15/2, 2019 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. – Subdivide 26/8, 2019 at 7:32

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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

Slr answered 26/9, 2012 at 21:29 Comment(2)

That converter messes up the header, especially if there is field size in header (DBASE). – Amando 17/3, 2014 at 17:23

Github project here: github.com/akadan47/dbf2csv – Skill 15/12, 2017 at 15:46

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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.

Gur answered 10/8, 2009 at 20:18 Comment(0)

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A search on Sourceforge yields some possibilities:

Heilman answered 10/8, 2009 at 20:19 Comment(0)

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For XLS or CSV, use OpenOffice.org.

Funnel answered 10/8, 2009 at 20:23 Comment(1)

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. – Funnel 10/8, 2009 at 20:28

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