Open a CSV or DBF inside a ZIP archive
Open data portals, statistics offices and GIS departments ship their downloads as .zip: a CSV with a readme, a census table split by state, a shapefile as five files. The usual routine is to extract everything to a folder, hunt for the right file, open it and forget to delete the folder. Here you open the archive itself and pick the table.
Free to use. The archive is read in your browser. Nothing is uploaded and nothing is written to your disk. Windows version — 4.9 MB, no installation: details. Pro — $29 once: price.
How it works
- Open the
.zipwith “Open files” or drag it into the window, like any table. - The app reads the archive’s table of contents — not the data — and lists every file it can open as a table: CSV and TSV, DBF (and DATASUS
.dbc), Excel, ODS, XML, JSON and GeoJSON, SQLite and GeoPackage, Access, Parquet. - If there is only one table, it opens straight away. If there are several, you get a list with checkboxes; every checked file opens in its own tab.
.txt,.datand.prnfiles are listed last and left unchecked: in open data they are as often a readme as a fixed-width table. Check one if it is data.
A file with an extension nobody recognizes — some government exports name their CSV like K3241.D40511.ESTABELE — is offered anyway when the archive has nothing else, and its format is detected from the content.
A shapefile in a ZIP
A shapefile almost always arrives zipped: .shp, .shx, .dbf, .prj and often .cpg. US Census TIGER/Line files are a familiar example. In the list you see one entry — the .dbf, marked “shapefile” — because the attributes are the only table in the set.
When you open it, the .cpg next to it is extracted too, and the encoding of the attributes is taken from it: accented place names come out right without guessing. The geometry files are skipped — the app shows the attribute table, not the map. More on that table in opening a shapefile’s .dbf.
The same goes for a DBF with memo fields: its .fpt or .dbt is extracted with it, so long text fields are not empty. See DBF memo files.
Big archives
- Opening the archive reads only its table of contents, at the end of the file. A 3 GB archive with a hundred files lists in a moment.
- Only the checked files are decompressed, and they are streamed into storage the browser manages itself instead of being held as one block of memory in the tab. Files stored without compression are read straight from the archive.
- A huge CSV still has to be inflated once. A gigabyte of compressed text takes some seconds; after that it behaves like any large CSV.
What will not open
- Password-protected entries. They are listed, but extracting them stops with a clear message.
- Compression other than standard Deflate — Deflate64, bzip2, LZMA, Zstandard. Some archivers use them for very large files. Re-pack the archive as an ordinary ZIP.
- .rar and .7z are different formats, not ZIP.
A ZIP inside a ZIP opens as one more archive. And .xlsx or .ods files, which are ZIP inside, keep opening as workbooks — even when someone renamed them to .zip.
FAQ
Is anything written to my disk?
No. The selected files are decompressed inside the browser tab; the archive on disk is not touched.
Is the archive uploaded anywhere?
No. It is read locally, in your browser or in the Windows app.
Can I open every table in the archive at once?
Yes: “Check all” in the list, then Open. Each table gets its own tab.
What if I edit a table from the archive?
Changes are saved to a separate file of your choice; the archive itself stays as it was.
Free to use. Your file is not uploaded to a server. Windows version — 4.9 MB, no installation: details. Pro — $29 once: price.