MDB File Viewer
Open Microsoft Access .mdb and .accdb files on a Mac, without Access. See what is inside, then export the tables to CSV or SQLite.
A .mdb file arrives, and macOS has nothing to open it with
Microsoft has never shipped Access for the Mac. Double-click the file and the Finder offers you nothing useful. The usual answers are a Windows virtual machine, an Office licence you do not want, or a web converter that asks you to upload the database first.
That last one is often the part you cannot do. The file came from a client, a council, an old server, or someone who left three years ago. It is not yours to hand to a stranger’s server.
This opens it on your Mac instead.
What it does
- Opens
.mdband.accdb. The older Jet formats and the newer Access formats both work, including encrypted.accdbfiles. Enter the password and it opens. - Lists every table with its row and column counts. You see the shape of the database before you take anything out of it.
- Opens a table and shows you the rows. ★ Scroll the whole table, however big it is, without exporting anything first. Read-only: cells can be read, never edited.
- Exports to CSV or SQLite. CSV with comma, semicolon or tab separators, UTF-8, with an optional BOM so Excel reads accents correctly. Or one SQLite file, ready to open in any SQL tool.
- Handles a whole folder. Drop in a stack of databases and each one exports into its own folder.
- Reports what happened. Exact row counts, anything skipped flagged clearly, and a summary saved beside the export as text, JSON and CSV.
- Copes with big databases. Tested on files over a gigabyte, with hundreds of tables and millions of rows. ★ A table with 600,000 rows opens in a couple of seconds and scrolls from the first row to the last.
Read a table without exporting it ★
Open any table and scroll it — every row and every column, in the order Access stored them. Useful before an export, when you want to check you have the right table, and useful on its own when reading the data is all you needed.
It is read-only in the strict sense: you can read a cell, not change one. Nothing is written back to the database.
Nothing leaves your Mac
- Read-only. The source database is opened and never written to. If an export goes wrong, the original is exactly as it was.
- Offline. No uploads, no account, no tracking, no analytics.
- One-time purchase. There is no subscription, and no licence server to check in with.
Requirements
| macOS | 12 Monterey or later |
|---|---|
| Hardware | Apple silicon and Intel |
| Formats in | .mdb, .accdb, .mde, .accde |
| Formats out | CSV, SQLite |
| Price | One-time purchase, no subscription |
Guides
- How to Open an MDB File on a Mac Four ways to open a Microsoft Access .mdb file on macOS, and what each one costs you in money, time and privacy.
- What Is an MDB File? An .mdb file is a Microsoft Access database. What is inside one, how it differs from .accdb, and why it will not open on a Mac.
- Microsoft Access for Mac Access has never had a Mac version. What the real alternatives are on macOS, and how to read the .mdb and .accdb files you already have.
- Open an ACCDB File on a Mac How to read a Microsoft Access .accdb database on macOS, including password-protected files, without installing Access or Windows.