Do you need XLS or XLSX?
You need XLS only if the file has to open in Excel 2003 or older, or in an old program that reads nothing newer. XLS is the binary Excel format from before 2007, and it stops at 65,536 rows and 256 columns per sheet. Every Excel since 2007 opens XLSX, which holds over a million rows, so DBF to XLSX is the better choice for nearly everyone else.
How to convert DBF to XLS
- Upload your .dbf file at the top of this page.
- Choose XLS as the output format.
- Convert, then download the .xls file.
Conversion runs on our servers. Our DBF reader first builds a clean spreadsheet from the table, then LibreOffice saves that spreadsheet as XLS.
What the reader fixes before the file reaches Excel
Letting an office suite open the DBF directly is what used to go wrong. Headers came out as NAME,C,30 instead of NAME, dates arrived as text, and non-English letters turned into symbols because the code page in the file header was ignored. Now our reader decodes the table first: it reads the declared code page or detects it, turns dates and numbers into real values, maps logical fields to TRUE and FALSE, and handles Visual FoxPro null and varchar fields. Only then is the XLS written.
When a table is too big for XLS
A table with more than 65,536 records or more than 256 fields won't fit in an XLS sheet. We stop and tell you, so you can pick XLSX or CSV, which have room for it. dBASE 7 files and files that aren't really DBF also get a message rather than a broken download.
Other DBF conversions
For a printable copy, DBF to PDF repeats the header row on every page. The DBF converter lists every output, and the XLS converter covers what you can do with the XLS afterwards, including turning it back into a table with XLS to DBF.