DBF creation and manipulation without excel 2003

Question

My company just upgraded to Office 2007 and now I am no longer able to easily manipulate and create dbf's. I do not understand MS's decision by removing this capability but alas there is no use crying over spilled milk. I ask everyone here, what do you use (preferably free) to fill all your dbf needs?

Answer 1

For opening and editing, Open Excel 2007 and simply drag the dbf file to it.

To create a new DBF file (http://www.excelforum.com/excel-2007-help/643473-save-as-dbf.html):

• In Excel 2007, Go to "file > Save As.." and choose .csv

• Now open Access 2007 and Choose import data and select the csv file

• The data then loads into a table and from there you can export the data from Access into a DBF file! Choosing either DBF3, DBF4, DBF5

Answer 2

I've used Open Office for working with dbf files.

Answer 3

for editing, either of these two is handy (never tried to create):

http://www.pablosoftwaresolutions.com/html/dbf_explorer.html

http://sdteffen.de/gtkdbfeditor/index_en.html

Answer 4

I've used this add in to save to dbf created by the theXLwiz.

Answer 5

Google Docs - docs.google.com upload .xls(.xlsx save download dbf.) or Jakub's method

Answer 6

I've been using R. In the core packages there is a package called foreign which enables you to read/write dbf files with ease. You can read a dbf file that is associated with a shapefile, and completely overwrite it without problems (assuming that you do not delete a row). You can also just output a dataframe into dbf format, which I sometimes do as it is a compact data format. The code is as follows, where dataframe is your data, and file is the filename:

write.dbf(dataframe, file, factor2char = TRUE, max_nchar = 254)

Answer 7

I load my xls, xlsx file into arcmap and open the attribute table, hide any columns that are unwanted, select only rows with data (sometimes it shows extra null rows), and then export data (choose the dbf type).

Answer 8

I've successfully used the FoxPro ODBC driver to connect to a folder full of DBFs. There are a few caveats if you're going to delete rows (make sure the DBF driver posts the deletes, not just the diffs) but otherwise it's not too bad.

You can connect from other clients beyond Office, too, which is handy for scripting purposes and the like.

Answer 9

I sometimes use Infolib, or more accurately the command line dbf2info utilities created from infolib, by Randy Deardorff of the US Environment Protection Agency, circa 1998. Although ostensibly written only for the 'info' in arcinfo, it works with plain text files too. Unfortunately the windows binaries don't work on 64bit windows.

-=[ INFOLIB.BAT ]=-

        AVAILABLE INFOLIB COMMANDS (recall by typing "infolib")

        ascii2info   dbf2info     dbfitems     dbflist
        dbflook      info2ascii   info2dbf     infodel
        infodir      infoitems    infolist     infolook

I couldn't find an existing internet host for these tools, so I put the stuff from my stash up at google code: http://code.google.com/p/infolib/ (binaries too).

Update: Credits for infolib proper goes to Todd Stellhorn of ESRI, with Randy being responsible for the tool collection. From the readme "These programs make extensive use of a public domain C package for direct INFO access called infolib written by Todd Stellhorn of ESRI."

Answer 10

I used to use a program called DBF Viewer plus, it sounds similar to DBF Manager, I haven't used it for a couple of years, so not sure if still available

it's available from here http://www.alexnolan.net/software/

Answer 11

DBF Manager is able to view, edit, create dBase and FoxPro including Visual FoxPro databases.

http://www.dbfmanager.com/