MDB to Excel

What to expect

Many .mdb files have outlived the program that made them: a parts list from a retired stock system, a member register a volunteer kept for years, a sample log from an old lab PC. The people who need that data now tend to work in a spreadsheet, and this page gets it there without installing anything.

Drop an .mdb file from Access 97, 2000 or 2003 and you get one .xlsx workbook back. Every table becomes its own sheet, with the column names in the first row. You don't need a copy of Access, and the database never leaves this browser tab. A newer .accdb file works here too.

Numbers stay numbers, Yes/No fields become TRUE and FALSE, and dates become real Excel dates you can sort and filter. After each conversion, "What changed" under the file lists anything that didn't carry over exactly.

How to convert MDB to Excel

1. Drop the .mdb file on the box at the top of this page, or use Choose file. You can add several at once.
2. The database is read in this tab. A bar fills as its rows come in.
3. When "Your file is ready" appears, choose Download. With more than one database, "Download all (.zip)" saves them together.
4. Open "What changed" under the file to see what was approximated or left out, with counts.

Reading your workbook

Each sheet takes its table's name. Excel allows 31 characters in a sheet name and no [ ] : * ? / or \, so a longer name is shortened and those characters become an underscore. If two names would end up the same, the second gets a number, and a table called History gets an underscore added, because Excel keeps that name for itself.

Dates keep the clock time Access showed, with no time zone added, so they read the same wherever you open the file. Two kinds stay as text: dates before 1 March 1900, which Excel's calendar either doesn't reach or counts a day off, and times Access stored without a date. Access counts those from 30 December 1899, so they arrive as text such as 1899-12-30 09:30:00.

Currency arrives as a plain number: a price Access showed as $3.50 becomes 3.5. Format the column as currency in Excel and it looks as it did before.

Approximated rows still reach your workbook, in another shape: an OLE object becomes [binary], and a very long text is cut at Excel's limit. The counts come from running our converter over licensed test databases, and our tests fail if a number drifts from what the converter actually does.

Big databases

An Excel sheet holds 1,048,575 rows, so a longer table is split across sheets named like "Orders (1)" and "Orders (2)", each with the header row. Here, one workbook holds up to 8,000,000 cells (rows times columns, all tables together), because a bigger one can run a browser tab out of memory. For a database that size, MDB to CSV writes each table as it goes.

Files over 25 MB can take a while. We'll ask before starting one, and you can always continue.

Database passwords

The .mdb files with an Access 2000–2003 database password in our tests opened here without it; the MDB page says what we've checked. If you drop an encrypted .accdb, we'll ask for its password right in the file list. It's used once, in this tab, and we don't send or store it.

If something goes wrong

• "This file looks damaged, or it isn't the format its name suggests": the copy may have stopped short, or another kind of file was renamed to .mdb. Copy it again from where it lives and try once more.
• "This format isn't on our list yet": the small .ldb file next to a database is a lock file Access makes while the database is open. Pick the .mdb itself.
• "This database has more cells than one workbook can hold here": convert it with MDB to CSV instead.
• A table is missing: open "What changed". A linked table lives in another file, often a back-end database on a shared drive, so convert that file. A database with no tables of its own gives a workbook with one empty sheet.
• Rows in a different order: Access sorts its datasheet by the key, while the file keeps rows in the order they were stored. Sort the sheet in Excel.
• A saved query isn't in the workbook: only tables are exported. If you have Access, a make-table query saves a query's result as a table.
• "Something unexpected stopped this conversion": reload the page and try again. If the same file stops twice, it probably uses something our reader doesn't handle yet.

Try it with a sample file

Not ready to use your own database? Download sample-access97-types.mdb (116 KB), a small Access 97 test file from the open-source mdb-reader project, and drop it above. You'll get four sheets. Table1 has two rows with one column of each common type, so you can see how a date, a currency amount and a Yes/No value land in Excel. The other three sheets hold only their column names. Its source and license are in the sample notes.