Thread: Excel 2007 Add-in to save DBF

I have been "upgraded" to Excel 2007 which I discovered does not save to DBF format

So I put together the attached Excel 2007 add-in to add this functionality back in. Once activated, it will add a "dBASE IV DBF" menu item in the Office menu Save As list. It works mostly like the Excel 2003 save as DBF.

To install, unzip the attachment to your "Documents and Settings\UserName\Application Data\Microsoft\AddIns\" folder and activate it in Excel.

One issue is that the Jet driver ignores the data types and uses what it thinks is best instead. A work-around would be to reopen the table with the VFPOLEDB driver and alter table the columns to what you want.

Hopefully people will find this more useful than copying the data to Access and exporting from there.

Hi there,

just wanted to let you know that I released a new version of the add-
in that enables saving a DBF file in Excel 2007.

New features:

1. Now you can add/insert new fields, create calculated fields in
addition to adding new records or editing existing records in your
native DBF file!

2. If you start with an Excel file the software now have enhanced
capabilities to determine the field types (better than Microsoft's own
in earlier Excel versions).

3. The add-in checks DBase field naming conventions and also
identifies duplicate fields. All problem field names are visually
identified with a cell comment!

4. If you start out with a brand new file and forget to save it, the
add-in will ask before the conversion.

5. Large files are supported. I edited files over 500,000 records with
no problem.

See the post at http://thexlwiz.blogspot.com/.

Gyula

Dear Fellow DBF Users,

The latest upgrade of the SaveDBF Excel 2007 add-in (used to be called XLSX2DBF) can be tried at thexlwiz.blogspot.com.

The changes include fixes related to minor bugs in Microsoft's OLEDB engine and some improved field type identification for users who start out with an Excel file.

Future plans:

I plan one more upgrade in Jan/Feb 2010. This will be a major upgrade with lots of planned improvements as listed below:

- Add a Preference window where users can set to:

Overwrite the original DBF file (and create a date-stamped backup file in the same folder)
Mimic Microsoft's Excel 2003 behaviour (i.e. automatically replace spaces in field names with an underscore, accept field names longer than 10 characters)

- Add a Data Conversion window where the user can change the field type and size from what the add-in determined from the data. This is useful for people who start with an Excel file with data that do not necessarily reflect the maximum field size for a character field, for example. The add-in will guess the maximum size from the data, but the user can over-ride it in the new window. Or you can simply click OK and the add-in will behave exactly as it does now.

- Batch processing capabilities (i.e. calling the macro from a third party program (e.g. Python or Perl or C++ etc) and mass-process many files without user interaction.

- Improved speed for very large DBF files and a progress bar with % complete reported.

If you have other improvement ideas this is the time to email them to me at gygulyas - a t - yahoo - do t - ca!

Thank you very much for your continued support!

Long live the DBF!

Gyula