Microsoft, ESRI, Excel, and DBF: Methods for disaster

Posted by Dan Miller on January 28th, 2008 filed in Tools

So, on an average day with average frustrations I would not spend time writing on a topic as nuanced as this, but certainly an issue this important deserves a bit of a note for my fellow GIS users. DBF files, for those who are familiar with them, are key to how data is held in ArcGIS projects - all attributes for spatial entities are held in them. Modifying, manipulating, and otherwise changing data in these attribute tables is as easy as 1, 2, 3 (or so you would believe) if you have a program such as excel installed on your computer - with one … small … caveat. It only works about 25% of the time. The other 75% you will find yourself wondering why your data you just entered into your DBF has magically dissapeared (no matter how many times you save it), your DBF will not load into ArcGIS after you complete your modifications, or any of a thousand other errata than can occur. After beating my head against this issue for months I have finally found a solution (well, 2):

1) Don’t use excel (see Open Office (http://www.openoffice.org) or freeware solution DBF Explorer (http://www.pablosoftwaresolutions.com/html/dbf_explorer.html)

2) If you insist on sticking to Microsoft, puruse this article on how to avoid errors with ArcGIS and Excel when using DBFs. Perhaps it will convince you otherwise: http://www.lib.umich.edu/nsds/spatial_tutorials/excel.html

I appreciate microsoft, I really do. But at some point, the madness has to end.


2 Responses to “Microsoft, ESRI, Excel, and DBF: Methods for disaster”

  1. Pat Langhans Says:
    September 8th, 2008 at 12:22 pm

    Well, we found out last Friday that our team (using ESRI) can no longer open any .dbf files using Excel 2007. It appears that Microsoft has depricated support for .dbf files because of low usage. Have you heard of any solutions? We are looking at migrating the .dbf database to SQLServer 2005, reinstalling Excel 2000 for these 3 people so they can continue doing their job. Have you heard of any solutions to this obvious oversight by Microsoft? We appreciate any advice/experience from other users.
    Sincerely,
    Pat Langhans
    Hecla Mining Company

  2. Dan Miller Says:
    September 8th, 2008 at 5:39 pm

    Hands down open office - it works better when dealing with null vs 0 values, and can handle everything excel could (especially if your doing anything in the short-term for a migration).

    As far as a solution to interoperability with excel 2007, it seems that you may be out of luck - a quick google search brings fourth a few people trying to put something together in VB, but nothing looking solid enough to use.

    D

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