Fast MDB and Access DB Viewer

• Microsoft Access files on a Mac, with no Access (or Windows) required
• custom-built Jet engine parser opens .mdb and .accdb databases natively.
• Browse the tables, then filter and sort to dig out what you need.

Microsoft does not make Access for macOS, has never made Access for macOS, and shows no sign of starting. Historically your options were a Windows virtual machine, a paid converter, or asking the sender to export something else.

This app opens .mdb and .accdb files directly. Tables appear in a sidebar, data in a fast paging grid you can sort and filter, and memo fields display their full contents rather than a truncated stub. Thumbnails and Quick Look show real rows in your file browser.

The interesting part is that it required writing a Jet and ACE database engine from scratch. The usual open-source route, mdbtools, is GPL licensed and therefore cannot ship on the Mac App Store. So the parser was written from the publicly reverse-engineered format documentation: table definitions, the reversed variable-offset row layout Access uses, null-mask booleans, LVAL memo pages, the MSysObjects catalogue and the MSysRelationships table that records how tables connect. It was verified against databases generated by Jackcess, and tested on a real 45-table database with 163,000 rows.

MDB Pro (£4.99) adds a relationships diagram drawn from the database's own declared foreign keys, CSV export of single tables or the whole database, and a T-SQL migration kit that generates schema DDL plus full data INSERT scripts for moving an Access database into SQL Server.

Access 2000 through 2003 (Jet 4) and 2007 onwards (ACE) are supported. Encrypted and password-protected databases are out of scope.

Demo

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!