MDB Excavation

MDB is a Microsoft Access Database file. We’d like to look inside of it, but we have a Mac and no MS Office license.

export.py is a program that can do each of the following:

1. Put each table into its own .csv file to look at.
2. Put each table in the data into an excel / google sheets doc for easy viewing/browsing
3. Create a sqlite db which is similarly portable but accessible via a variety of common tools

Prerequisites

• mdbtools, a set of tools for working with mdb files from the command line. brew install mdbtools
• pip install -r requirements.txt in order to write Excel files.

Usage:

export.py [-h] mdb_file format

Convert MDB files to CSV, XLSX, or SQLite

positional arguments:
  mdb_file    Path to the MDB file
  format      Export format: csv, xlsx, or sqlite

options:
  -h, --help  show this help message and exit

Credits

• This gist by mywarr inspired my approach.