MDB Files

[Nribelin]

What if any would the proper procedure be to Convert ESRI mdb files to autocad?
Does Arc2Cad of any version handle this?

[GuthCAD Software Support]

Hi,

Arcv2CAD does not currently handle MDB files directly (direct support is planned for Arcv2CAD 6). So you need to first export the shapefiles out of the MDB file.

If you do not have ArcGIS etc, then an option is to use the open source (free) OGR2OGR command line utility. OGR2OGR comes with the FWTOOLS.

1. Download FWTOOLS here

http://fwtools.maptools.org/

2. Suggest installing into a folder that is easy to locate, e.g. C:\FWTOOLS

3. Open an MS-DOS window in order to run the OGR2OGR utility. The general syntax is

ogr2ogr out_shp my_pgdb.mdb

- where 'out_shp' is the name of the folder where the extracted shapefiles will be placed.

Example:

Extract shapefiles from the personal geodatabase file C:\mygis\mydata.mdb to the folder c:\myshapefiles

c:\fwtools\bin\ogr2ogr c:\myshapefiles C:\mygis\mydata.mdb

(Not sure whether the folder c:\myshapefiles needs to exist prior to the translation.)


regards
Software Support