Convert dBase to XLSX

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.

Sheet names and cell types

The workbook is generated rather than exported out of Excel, so every choice in it is one the converter made. The two that show up the moment you open the file are what the sheet is called and what type each cell turned out to be.

• →The sheet takes the table's name cut to 31 characters, which is Excel's own limit for a tab, while the workbook file keeps the name in full - so a long table name is complete in the file name and shortened on the tab inside it.
• →Dates and timestamps become genuine date cells, formatted yyyy-mm-dd and yyyy-mm-dd h:mm:ss, rather than strings that merely look like dates. Sorting and date arithmetic work on them with no conversion step first.
• →A text column of digits stays text: a value like 01234 is written into a string cell, and Excel shows it as it was stored instead of dropping the zeros the way it does when the same data is opened from a CSV.

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 XLSX

• →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 XLSX

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