What you get when you convert DBF to Excel
You get an XLSX file where each DBF field is a column and each record is a row, with the field names as plain headers. Text in Russian, Greek, Turkish, Korean or any other language reads correctly, because we read the code page the file declares instead of guessing it wrong. Dates are real Excel dates, numbers are real numbers you can sum, and logical fields show TRUE or FALSE.
Getting those right is the hard part. We used to convert DBF through an office suite, and it gave headers like NAME,C,30, dates stored as text and accented letters turned into symbols. So we wrote our own DBF reader.
How to convert DBF to XLSX
- Upload your .dbf file with the box at the top of this page.
- Check that XLSX is selected as the output format.
- Convert, then download the XLSX and open it in Excel, Google Sheets or LibreOffice Calc.
The conversion runs on our servers, not in your browser. A table with 100,000 rows takes about 3 seconds once the upload has finished.
Why DBF text turns into gibberish in other converters
A DBF file doesn't store text as UTF-8 by default. It stores bytes in an old code page, such as Windows-1251 for Cyrillic or CP866 for DOS-era Russian data, and records which one in a single byte of the file header. A converter that ignores that byte decodes everything as Western European text, so every non-English letter comes out wrong.
Our reader checks for UTF-8 first, then uses the code page the header declares. When the header declares none, which happens with files from some older programs, it works out the most likely code page from the text itself. If a file still shows the wrong letters after converting, the program that created it probably wrote the wrong code page into the header.
What happens to each DBF field type in Excel
| DBF field | How it's stored in the DBF | What you get in Excel |
|---|---|---|
| Character (C) | Fixed-width text | Text |
| Numeric (N) and Float (F) | Digits written as text | Real numbers you can sum and sort |
| Date (D) | Eight characters, like 19980314 | A real Excel date |
| Logical (L) | One letter: T, F, Y or N | TRUE or FALSE |
| Varchar (V), Visual FoxPro | Variable-length text | Text at its real length |
| Null values, Visual FoxPro | A hidden flags field | Empty cells, not zeros |
Columns are sized to their content, so you can read the sheet without dragging every column wider first.
Files we won't convert, and what you see instead
When a file can't be converted properly, you get a message saying why, not a broken spreadsheet.
- dBASE 7 files, which use a different header layout, aren't supported yet.
- Files with a .dbf name that aren't DBF tables, such as a renamed spreadsheet, are rejected.
- Very large tables are fine for XLSX, which holds up to 1,048,576 rows. The older XLS format stops at 65,536 rows and 256 columns, so pick XLSX for big tables.
Other ways to export DBF data
XLSX is the right pick when someone will open the data in Excel. For an import into another database or a web app, DBF to CSV is smaller and faster. DBF to XLS is only worth it for Excel 2003 or older. To share a read-only copy, use DBF to PDF, which repeats the header row on every page. Going the other way, XLSX to DBF turns a spreadsheet back into a DBF table. Every DBF option is on the DBF converter page, and the XLSX converter lists what XLSX files convert to.