Convert MDB to CSV
Upload a .mdb or .accdb or .mde file and get back a CSV file. Types are preserved rather than flattened to text. Free, no registration, up to 10MB.
Click to upload or drag and drop
CSV, Excel, SQLite, SQL, DBF (max 10 MB)
How your data is typed in CSV
Generated from the converter's own CSV type mapping — this is what it actually emits, not an example.
| Your data | CSV type |
|---|---|
| Whole number | text (CSV has no types) |
| Decimal (money) | text (CSV has no types) |
| Floating point | text (CSV has no types) |
| True / false | text (CSV has no types) |
| Date | text (CSV has no types) |
| Date and time | text (CSV has no types) |
| Short text | text (CSV has no types) |
| Long text | text (CSV has no types) |
| Binary data | text (CSV has no types) |
Working from an .mdb file
An .mdb file is Jet 4, the engine Access used up to 2003. It is the format most likely to be sitting on a share drive with no copy of Access left in the building to open it - which is the situation this converter exists for.
- →Jet 4 caps a database at 2 GB and a table at 255 columns, which is why an .mdb that has outgrown its purpose is usually a migration rather than a rewrite.
- →There is no companion file to hunt for. A .ldb sitting beside the database is only a lock file from whoever last had it open, and nothing in it is needed - upload the .mdb on its own.
- →Every table is read into memory in one pass before anything is written out, which is affordable only because the free upload is capped at 10 MB; a full-size Jet database would not be.
The shape of the CSV files you get
CSV is where the type information stops, so what is left to describe is the file itself: how a row is terminated, which fields are quoted, and how a value that used to have a type is spelled out as characters.
- →Rows end with a carriage return and a line feed, the RFC 4180 ending, while a newline inside a quoted field stays the single character it always was. The encoding is UTF-8 with no byte-order mark in front of it.
- →Quotes go on only where they are needed - a field holding a comma, a double quote or a newline - and a quote inside a field is doubled rather than escaped with a backslash. Every other field is written bare.
- →Decimal values are written digit for digit and never through a floating-point number, so a money column that was exact in the source is still exact in the file. Booleans are written lower case, as true and false, which is the spelling this converter's own reader takes back as a boolean.
Reading MDB
- →Dates are exported in ISO form, avoiding the ambiguous 12/02/21 that Access tools produce by default.
- →NULL and the empty string stay distinct.
- →Access can hold dates outside the range it can represent. Those become NULL and the conversion tells you, rather than dropping them silently.
- →Requires mdbtools on the server; if it is unavailable you get a clear error rather than a partial conversion.
Writing CSV
- →One file per table, with a header row.
- →NULL is written as an empty field, never the word "None".
- →Binary data is written as hex, which is reversible.
What you get
A ZIP containing <table>.csv. If anything about your data needed a judgement call, a _warnings.txt explains it.
Questions
- Is converting MDB to CSV free?
- Yes. Files up to 10MB convert free with no account. There is a limit of five conversions per day per IP address.
- Will my MDB data keep its types in CSV?
- Yes — that is the point. Whole numbers, decimals, dates and booleans are mapped to real CSV types rather than everything becoming text. The mapping table above shows exactly what you get.
- Do you store my file?
- No. The file is written to a temporary directory, converted, and the directory is deleted as soon as your download has been sent.