Convert xBase to Excel

Working from an xBase table

xBase is the family name for the record layout dBase defined and Clipper, FoxBase and FoxPro adopted. A file from any of them opens here; the differences live in the header bytes, and those are read rather than assumed.

• →Records deleted but never packed are still physically present, flagged with an asterisk. They are skipped, so the converted table holds the rows the application showed and not the ones it hid.
• →Clipper is the trap in this family: it wrote version byte 0x03 even for tables with memo columns, so a naive reader picks the wrong memo layout and dies with "unpack requires a buffer of 8 bytes". That case is handled here.
• →The header gives each field an 11-byte name slot, so xBase column names are at most 10 characters - a limit that follows the data into the target unless you rename the columns there.

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 xBase

• →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 xBase 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