[Solved] Works Database (WDB) Files Conversion

[White Phoenix]

I have less than 20 Works database files left to convert to anything so I can replace them with text files, Writer or Calc. I tried LibreOffice 7.2.6, but it crashed.
I am using Windows 7 Professional SP1 64 bit.

I am thinking maybe opening them as XML files. Would that work?

[Mountaineer]

Why do you ask?
Right click and open in an editor.
If you see something readable, find out if it is xml.

Works was even at its active times ill supported by Microsoft, and also MS-Office needed compatibility-packs to support Works files.

[thomasjk]

I'm installing Libreoffice 7.2.6. If you want to upload a file I'll try to convert one for you.

[White Phoenix]

Microsoft may not have supported Works well, but then I never had any problems with Works. It did what I needed it to do without any problems outside of lack of true Unicode support instead of using code pages. Well, I will try opening a file in Notepad++ and see what happens.

[Mountaineer]

I used google a bit...

Most often it is suggested to buy Works9 and install it under Win10 to access and convert the files.

MS have provides a Works-converter, but I don't know, if this includes databases .wdb ??

At this german site
https://www.tutonaut.de/ms-works-wps-wk ... x-oeffnen/
i found the suggestion to rename the works-database to .odb, and it will be opened with LibreOffice-Base in Table-view. You may test this with a copy of one of your files.

At
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/mso ... bdf7141358
you ma find this link:
http://www.codealchemists.com/worksdatabaseconverter/

I never used Works, so i can't test this myself or check the contents of a file. If you upload a file I will check...

J

[White Phoenix]

Nope. I am not upgrading anymore. I pay $500 for an upgrade and loose more good features than I gain. Besides it looks like a moot point. Here is a screenshot of one of the files in Notepad++. [img]https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=52 ... 0436951747[/img]
If you can’t access the image, here is a sample of the text:
ÐÏࡱá > þÿ þÿÿÿ ÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿýÿÿÿ þÿÿÿ þÿÿÿþÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿR o o t

[Villeroy]

It is a Microsoft file format from the 90ies. Of course it is a binary. The idea to rename the file so it has an .odb extension demonstrates the total ignorance of Windows users. This is just another method to open some file with Open/LibreOffice. In case of success it would load the data into a Calc sheet. Base can not open any files other than true .odb files that are not just renamed. If your LibreOffice crashes with your files, I'm pretty sure that they will crash with any .od? extension as well.
If LO crashes when you try to open some file (.wdb is a supported binary file format), you should try to open the file while running LO in safe mode (menu:Help>Restart in safe mode...).

[White Phoenix]

It is a Microsoft file format from the 90ies. Of course it is a binary. The idea to rename the file so it has an .odb extension demonstrates the total ignorance of Windows users. This is just another method to open some file with Open/LibreOffice. In case of success it would load the data into a Calc sheet. Base can not open any files other than true .odb files that are not just renamed. If your LibreOffice crashes with your files, I'm pretty sure that they will crash with any .od? extension as well.
If LO crashes when you try to open some file (.wdb is a supported binary file format), you should try to open the file while running LO in safe mode (menu:Help>Restart in safe mode...).

Um, is this in reply to my last post showing the contents of the WDB file as opened in Notepad++? I did not change any extension to enable the file to work in OpenOffice or LibreOffice. I don’t know about anyone else on this thread, but I am not writing about opening ODS or ODB files. I am strictly posting about WDB files and nothing else. If anyone else was posting about OpenOffice/LibreOffice files on this thread, then they are off-topic. These are not OpenOffice files renamed with Works extensions either. I really do not understand what you are ranting about. Some of the statements even seem to contradict themselves to me.

All I wanted to do was rescue the data somehow. Since you brought up Safe Mode. After LibreOffice crashed it did open up in Safe Mode after that. So I will try that. Nope. LibreOffice could not open the WDB file. So I suspect that considering the age and multiple transfers of the files over the years, the files are corrupt. In which case I will have no choice but to recreate these files like so many others that were completely deleted back in November, 2018.

[Mountaineer]

Nobody said you should invest $500
I saw works at around 65€ and you can also try to use MS-Office to convert. I saw older versions around 20 €.
It is your problem, not mine and the price-tag you label on recreation or access the files is your decision.

Because my actual interest is file-formats I also found
https://docs.fileformat.com/database/wdb/
Wich confirms Villeroy on the binary format.
I suspect there may be variants of the file-format overbthe years.

And as you said "off-topic": Your question was to open as xml. So The answer is: "No, will not work".
Question answered, problem not solved.
Good luck.

[White Phoenix]

Most often it is suggested to buy Works9 and install it under Win10 to access and convert the files.

Which would require me to purchase Windows 10. Well, OK, $130 or so. Still a lot of money when on a small SSI budget.

In the meantime, I went ahead and tried opening the file with OpenOffice and wound up with a list of choices. The ones that worked were dBASE and Uniform Office Format 2 Text. The last one opened up a window with a sort of guide, but no information. Opening as a dBASE file wound up pretty much like Notepad++ but more organized and readable.
}VT&Times New RomanÿVT&Verdanaw Romanÿ ZT Å ZT Å& ZT Y\T >)>>*>>*??+@@+AA,BB,CC-DD.EE/FF0II1II1JJ2KK3LL4OO5OO5PP7QQ7SS8TT9UUE``„––ÉÒÒôööÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿùúúÊÔÔoŠŠFiidT_TMÐd 2@e}}}SS}}}}SS}}}}SS}}}}SS}_TM¤Ðd 2@e}}}SS}}}}SS}}}}SS}}}}SS}_TMHÐd 2@e}}}SS}}}}SS}}}}SS}}}}SS}_TMìÐd 2@e}}}SS}}}}SS}}}}SS}}}}SS}_TMÐd 2@e}}}SS}}}}SS}}}}SS}}}}SS}$oT3TPTgTt  à=Ð/Ð8  à=Ð/Ð8d#T  à=Ð/Ð8d&ò%ò[T @¯ÀSociologicalBeginning of Sumaria.[T p—ÀPolitical%Shang Dynasty begins in China.[T dž@
05.07Political.Germany surrenders. WW2 in Europe ends.[T dž@
08.14Political-Japan surrenders. WW2 in Pacific ends.[T ¬ž@
11.22Political0US President John F Kennedy assassinated.[T Ÿ@ 11Political!Berlin Wall is demolished.ÿÿ| ÿ# ÿT ÿþÿ ÿÿÿÿÃÛÍ(â ΢šªJrMicrosoft Works Database MSWCompObjÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿ/^ÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿorksDBDocô9²q

[Zizi64]

Try the LibreOffice. It has .wdb option in the list of Open feature. Maybe it will not work with your files, but the LO knows the .wdb extension:

Click on the image for a sharper view.

Or please upload (or share in another way) at least one of the problematic files. We will try it with LO.

[RoryOF]

If an earlier version of LibreOffice opened the files, then the logical solution is to remove the current installed version of LibreOffice, install the older version, do all the conversions, then reinstall the current LibreOffice.

[Zizi64]

If an earlier version of LibreOffice opened the files, then the logical solution is to remove the current installed version of LibreOffice, install the older version, do all the conversions, then reinstall the current LibreOffice.

...On Win7 it is enough to use a portable version of the desired LO version.

[White Phoenix]

Well, when I opened the file in OpenOffice a list was given to me to try to open the file. LibreOffice just flashed an error message and closed. Maybe I have to select the file type first. Nope same as OpenOffice: General Error. General input/output error.
Well, interestingly enough, despite Villeroy’s possible objection to changing the file extension to get a file to work, since OpenOffice kind of opened the file as a dBASE file, and selecting DBF made all of the files invisible to LibreOffice, I changed the extension. LibreOffice immediately recognized it and opened it as a dBASE file. OpenOffice just opened it partially as before. Now I just have to decide which format to save it as or port the data to. Actually it looks like a spreadsheet which someone once said was all Works database was, and what I use as databases today. Heh. After selected “Save As” LibreOffice immediately went to ODS. Problem solved. Too bad the moving marquees around the selected cells drive me nuts and the behavior cannot be turned off, and they won’t change that.

[Zizi64]

LibreOffice immediately recognized it and opened it as a dBASE file.

Then that is a dbase type file with "false" filename extension. The Microsoft often had lie about the real type of the files. Sometimes the RTF files was saved as .doc file, but the structure inside the file was RTF like.

[John_Ha]

Ask Mrs Duckduckgo what she knows about convert wdb file to xls ...

Showing that a problem has been solved helps others searching so, if your problem is now solved, please view your first post in this thread and click the Edit button (top right in the post) and add [Solved] in front of the subject.

[White Phoenix]

Showing that a problem has been solved helps others searching so, if your problem is now solved, please view your first post in this thread and click the Edit button (top right in the post) and add [Solved] in front of the subject.

Yes, I know how to mark a thread as solved, thank you. However,....
Not only will LibreOffice not open any of my other files, it now will not open the file that it opened before and converted to ODS, not even in Safe Mode. I even tried to repair the install through the Programs and Features. It still isn’t working.
It’s times like these that make me want to print out all of my files and go back to using paper and pen stored in notebooks and index cards. Also going back to using regular mail service and restoring my library of books.

[RoryOF]

Frequently a bad file opening may be overcome by a computer reboot and immediate use of the application to open the troublesome file.

Have you considered that, over time, some of these files may have degraded in storage, either by corruption on the hard drive(s) or by bad transfer from older drives?

[Mountaineer]

Most often it is suggested to buy Works9 and install it under Win10 to access and convert the files.

Which would require me to purchase Windows 10. Well, OK, $130 or so. Still a lot of money when on a small SSI budget.

No need: Download Win10 and use the Key of your current Win7, if you want to replace it.
For Testing - Just skip the Registration. You have 30 days. Enough to do your conversions. Then remove Win10.

If the Problem is "i don't Like it" use Open Shell on Win10 - it hides Most of the optics and feels Like normal Win7.

[Mountaineer]

... and selecting DBF made all of the files invisible to LibreOffice ...

Two problems with .dbf: For Base you select NOT the File, but the folder, wich contains the File. All .dbf-Files in the folder are tables of the Same Database.
If you Open a single .dbf it is loaded in Calc, Not Base.
The other is a small Bug. In some systems only one writing is recognized .DBF or .dbf the other is invisible

J.

[White Phoenix]

... and selecting DBF made all of the files invisible to LibreOffice ...

Two problems with .dbf: For Base you select NOT the File, but the folder, wich contains the File. All .dbf-Files in the folder are tables of the Same Database.
If you Open a single .dbf it is loaded in Calc, Not Base.

But they are not really dBASE files. They are Works files with the DBF extension. I never had dBASE.

[White Phoenix]

Frequently a bad file opening may be overcome by a computer reboot and immediate use of the application to open the troublesome file.

Okay, I am pretty sure I didn’t try opening the files immediately after rebooting. So I will try that and see what happens.

Have you considered that, over time, some of these files may have degraded in storage, either by corruption on the hard drive(s) or by bad transfer from older drives?

Yes. If you read the posts you will see that I suspected that, after seeing the results in Notepad++. Besides, the one file that did work, doesn’t work any more. They were all stored in the same place. So what are the odds that one file was good and the rest not?
UPDATE: Well, I finally got LibreOffice to the point where I could just open it up and try opening the file without interruptions. And it still couldn’t open the file. I even did it with the antivirus off in case that was interfering with accessing the file.
This is all the error message reported: A problem caused the program to stop working correctly. Please close the program.
I have a crash report log:
ProductName=LibreOffice
Version=7.2.6.2
BuildID=b0ec3a565991f7569a5a7f5d24fed7f52653d754
URL=https://crashreport.libreoffice.org/submit/
UseSkia=true
Language=en-US
CPUModelName= Intel(R) Pentium(R) CPU G2130 @ 3.20GHz
CPUFlags=sse3 pclmulqdq monitor ssse3 cpmxch16b sse41 sse42 popcnt xsave osxsave msr cx8 sep cmov clfsh mmx fxsr sse sse2 ht fsgsbase erms lahf syscall rdtscp
MemoryTotal=4094032 kB

[Zizi64]

But they are not really dBASE files. They are Works files with the DBF extension. I never had dBASE

You can create .doc files even is you have not MS Office...
Many softwares can create foreign file types...


PLEASE upload a sample file here. Then we will able to examine it.

[White Phoenix]

Here is a sample file it originally had the WDB extension. Okay, the extension DBF is not allowed. ??? The extension WDB is not allowed. Okay, I’ll make it a text file.

[John_Ha]

Changing the file extension is like changing the label on a tin of tomatoes from tomatoes to plums. It makes no difference to what is inside. It just confuses anyone wanting to use the tin. The tin may now be labelled plums but it still has tomatoes in it.

NEVER, NEVER CHANGE A FILE QUALIFIER.

[RoryOF]

The idenifiers at start of the sample file indicate it to be "Compound File Binary Format, a container format defined by Microsoft COM. It can contain the equivalent of files and directories. It is used by Windows Installer and for documents in older versions of Microsoft Office. It can be used by other programs as well that rely on the COM and OLE API's."

That may be used by files of type doc, xls, ppt, msi, msg

Information from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_file_signatures

[Zizi64]

I can open your (renamed) 'Mythological Timeline.wdb' file in my LibreOffice 6.1.6 version. It is a small file with a few data only.
I just saved it into .ods format:

Mythological Timeline.ods

(8.68 KiB) Downloaded 91 times

[RoryOF]

The content of your file, Zizi64, matches what I fund within the sample file when inspected with a Hex editor.

[White Phoenix]

Really, John_Ha? And how was I supposed to upload the file since it would not accept WDB or DBF files? You do read the entire posts, don’t you?

[quote=RoryOF]That may be used by files of type doc, xls, ppt, msi, msg[/quote]
Well, okay. None of that jargon means anything to me.
I want to open them in order to convert them to either an OpenOffice spreadsheet or document, or even a plain text file. So what application will open the file reliably so I can do that? When I converted the first file, I thought I was going to do that with LibreOffice, but for some reason even after re-installing LO just hangs. Half the time I have to use the task manager to close the program.
If I cannot do that, if it’s a lost cause, fine. I’ll just write it off and recreate these files from scratch. But let me know one way or the other. I have a bunch of creative projects to work on. Plus I still have 3 to 4 TB of files to sort, remove redundancies, and re-organize so I can find my notes and references.

[White Phoenix]

I can open your (renamed) 'Mythological Timeline.wdb' file in my Libreoffice 6.1.6 version. It is a small file with a few data only.
I just saved it into .ods format:

Thanks Zizi64. If I knew they were going to be all like that, I wouldn’t really need to keep them.

So is the problem that I should install LibreOffice 6 instead of using 7?