DBF Viewer

• Quick Look .dbf (dBASE) files directly in Finder
• Open in app for basic interrogation

The .dbf file refuses to die. It is forty years old, it came from dBase, it was carried forward by FoxPro, and it is still the attribute table inside every ESRI shapefile shipped today. Which means GIS users, local government data teams and anyone handling legacy business data still receive them, and macOS still has no idea what they are.

DBF Viewer opens them instantly. Records browse in a sortable, filterable grid, field types are shown properly, and records marked deleted are hidden by default and counted, so you know they are there without them polluting your view. Thumbnails and Quick Look show real rows.

The xBase format is refreshingly honest engineering: a fixed header, 32-byte field descriptors, then fixed-width records. This reader handles dBase III, IV and V, and FoxPro, covering character, numeric, float, date and logical fields plus the Visual FoxPro integer and double types. It was verified against the dbfread reference implementation.

If you work with shapefiles, this opens the half of the shapefile that actually holds your data.

Requirements

Universal binary, so it runs on both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs.

• macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later
• Intel Mac or Apple Silicon (M1 or newer)

Installation

Download the file, unzip it, and copy it into your Applications folder. Open it once and it registers the Quick Look handler itself. Instructions are included with the download.

Apps downloaded here are signed by Apple, so you shouldn't see any Gatekeeper warnings.

Licence

What you may do: install and use the software, at no cost, on any Mac you own or control, for personal or business purposes.

What you may not do: sell, rent, lease, sublicense or otherwise charge anyone for the software; redistribute, repackage, bundle or host it for download (please point people at the official download page instead); or modify, adapt, translate, reverse-engineer, decompile or disassemble it, except to the limited extent applicable law expressly permits.

The software is licensed, not sold. All rights not expressly granted above are reserved by the copyright holder, who may offer future or paid versions under different terms.

Privacy

100% on-device. No accounts, no tracking, never connects to the internet, collects no data whatsoever.

Feedback

Please contact me with any feedback, issues, suggestions or requests!