Open dBASE files with NeoOffice
For some weird reasons MS Excel 2007 (or Mac Excel 2008) is no longer able to save a .DBF (dBASE) file. My old solution was to rely on Excel 2003 for related purposes, for instance, editing DBFs for shapefiles to be used in GeoDa or ArcView.
With a big happy surprise, I just discovered that the free open-source NeoOffice handles DBF files easily. What’s even more amazing is that, in NeoOffice, I don’t even need to redefine the “named range” when I add new rows or columns (in comparison, see the painful steps in Excel to dBase). Is this too good to be true?
A peculiar feature in NeoOffice is that it displays the first row of DBF in a strange way, showing not only the variable names but also some apparent formatting information. For instance, “VAR” becomes “VAR, N, 9, 3”. Simply ignore these formatting information and “trust your goddess” -- following this discussion, Importing and Exporting DBF Files -- things have been great in my test drive so far.