Convert dBase to Excel

Working from a dBase file

dBase III and IV gave the format its five original field types, and that small vocabulary is why a dBase table converts so cleanly: there is very little in one that a modern database cannot hold exactly.

• →Character, Numeric, Date, Logical and Memo are the whole type system. A Numeric field declared with no decimals becomes a 64-bit integer; one with decimals becomes an exact decimal of the declared width and scale.
• →dBase has no time-of-day type at all, so a Date field converts to a pure date and never to a timestamp at midnight.
• →dBase IV memo blocks carry an 8-byte header and dBase III's do not, so a .dbt written by either generation is read with the block layout it actually uses.

What opens the converted workbook

Choosing Excel as the target puts no copy of Excel anywhere in the process: the workbook is assembled on the server by a library and handed over finished. What that library writes is what decides how the result behaves when you open it.

• →The output is .xlsx, the OOXML format, and only that. There is no .xls option, so a machine that can open nothing newer than Excel 97-2003 needs the CSV target and a save from there instead.
• →Values are the only thing written. No formulas, no macros, no charts, no column widths, no frozen header row - which is why the first thing most people do with it is widen a column. If Excel opens it in Protected View, that is the mark of the web on a downloaded file rather than anything in the workbook.
• →A conversion is capped at a million rows across all of its tables, and a worksheet holds 1,048,576, so no table can ever arrive too tall for the sheet it is being written into.

Reading dBase

• →Numeric fields with decimals are read as exact decimals, not floats, so currency does not drift.
• →Character field widths are read from the header and carried into the target.
• →The code page declared in the file header is used, so Cyrillic, Western European and other legacy DOS encodings decode correctly instead of turning into mojibake. 157 code pages are recognised.
• →Files written by dBase III or Clipper declare no code page at all — the header byte for it did not exist yet. For those, the most plausible encoding is chosen by inspecting the text, and the conversion tells you it had to guess. The API takes a sourceEncoding parameter (e.g. cp866) to force it instead of guessing, though the widget above does not have a control for it yet.
• →Memo columns keep their text in a separate .dbt or .fpt file. If the .dbf declares one and it was not uploaded, the conversion stops and tells you which file to add, rather than handing you a table whose long text is silently blank.

Writing Excel

• →One file per table. Booleans stay booleans and numbers stay numbers.
• →Excel has no fixed-point type, so decimals become numbers — use a database target if exactness matters.

Convert dBase to something else

• MySQL
• PostgreSQL
• Oracle
• SQL Server
• SQLite
• DuckDB
• CSV

Convert something else to Excel

• CSV
• SQLite
• SQL dump
• JSON
• XML
• Parquet
• DuckDB
• MS Access
• PostgreSQL backup