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Welcome to Techsurvivors => Tech => Topic started by: sluggo on March 14, 2013, 12:51:53 PM

Title: Opening .dbt files with 10.6.8
Post by: sluggo on March 14, 2013, 12:51:53 PM

Just started using Trip Miles on my iPhone 4S to keep track of business mileage for tax purposes. I can email reports to myself, but they arrive in .dbt form. I read that the file can be opened with any text editor, but Text Edit only shows a bunch of code, not a readable report.
I probably could open it on my laptop with Vista, but I have accounting software on my Mac and would like to contain things to one computer instead of jumping back & forth. Is there an application someplace that I can download to read this file?

Title: Opening .dbt files with 10.6.8
Post by: gunug on March 14, 2013, 01:34:21 PM

I used to program in xBase databases and I thought I knew what DBT file format was for and it turns out I'm apparently correct:

QUOTE

The first block generally contains an 8-byte header, while the rest hold the data. DBT files also contain a sequence of empty blocks for future entries. DBT files can be opened and edited with the appropriate software.xBase is the catch-all name applied to programming languages that stem from the dBASE programming language developed by Aston-Tate. Numerous other programming languages employ the dBASE foundation, including FoxPro, Visual Objects, Visual dBase and Clipper.

-- http://dbt.fileextensions.net/

So it's a partial text file that's associated with a database record and each record can have a separate file. The header and other blocks probably mess up opening it with a text editor. I've seen some database file readers for MAC OS but don't know one that's structured to take care of this file format. What do the authors of "Trip Miles" expect you to do with these files once you export them? Seems kind of simple minded for them not to allow for export in a different file format or at least point to some package that they can be edited with outside the phone. Just off hand I would think you "might" do something with Excel or the Libreoffice database/spreadsheet software. It might work better if you could export the database file as well. Foxpro and other xBase programs could also associate graphics files with a given record and those were generally a more easily editable file format.

Title: Opening .dbt files with 10.6.8
Post by: sluggo on March 14, 2013, 01:42:48 PM

New app to me, trying to sort this part out. You can pick day/week/month/year report and email it to yourself. The report attached to the email downloads to my desktop as "TripMiles.dbt. The description at the makers site says that the file can be exported in CSV for Excel or HTML form. Looks like I need to snoop some more and sort out how.
No idea what to do with it from there. I'll do a little Googling and see what I can turn up from the app maker.

Title: Opening .dbt files with 10.6.8
Post by: sluggo on March 14, 2013, 01:52:31 PM

OK, now I'm getting somewhere. When the Export tab is selected in the Trip Miles app, you are presented with 2 choices. The first is "Tabular Report (in email)". The second is "Export to Excel/Numbers (in email)".
I selected the first choice and came up with the .dbt file. Selecting the second choice get me a .csv file that opens in Text Editor.
Thanks for the attempt gunug!

Title: Opening .dbt files with 10.6.8
Post by: Xairbusdriver on March 14, 2013, 01:56:34 PM

Since you already have a Windows machine, your best bet looks like using one of <these apps to convert it> to something that your financial app can import. Maybe even a plain text file.

Title: Opening .dbt files with 10.6.8
Post by: sluggo on March 14, 2013, 04:23:21 PM

I noticed MacKeeper in that link. It got some nasty write ups in certain places. I opted to stay away from it.

Title: Opening .dbt files with 10.6.8
Post by: Xairbusdriver on March 14, 2013, 06:21:40 PM

I don't use it, myself, either. But an app can sometimes get a back reputation just because it doesn't do what people think it should. Of course, when it does stuff that causes us to lose data, that reputation may be well deserved!

OTOH, I can't make any statements about MacKeeper since I've never used it. Part of its problem is that a similarly named malware (one carried by a Flash file, I think) came along about the same time the Mac app did.

The problem with the file is not so much the extension (which is simply used by the OS [Windows and Mac] to decide what app should be used to open it) as the format of the data, that is often purely text. An html page/file is nothing but plain text, but when opened in a web browser, it is much more useful than when viewed in TextEdit!

I think gunug pointed to some info about how each record is formatted in the .dbt file. And any app that uses that format knows how to display it in a manner that it is meant to be seen. As you said, even TextEdit can show you the text, but it is probably no more usable than looking at the raw data file output by Word!

So, the key is knowing what the pieces of data mean and where they are in the file as well as knowing how each record is marked.

Title: Opening .dbt files with 10.6.8
Post by: sluggo on March 15, 2013, 07:45:04 AM

New development. Today, when I emailed the report to my biz email address and used the "Tabular Report" option, the thing opened up beautifully in Firefox when I opened the email. I don't know why it didn't do that yesterday, but what I'm looking at today is just what I wanted to see. I'm sure it must have been an operator error of some sort.

Now the only issue is that when I printed the report out to test that function, it was very tiny on paper. That was remedied by unchecking the "Ignore scaling and fit to page width" box within the print options, sort of. I got the size to increase, but only half the width of the report showed up on paper. It seems that I have to somehow adjust things within print settings to get where I need to be. I've spent half the morning trying to figure out how to properly resize, but no luck yet.
I appreciate the advice and suggestions Jim and gunug.

Title: Opening .dbt files with 10.6.8
Post by: Xairbusdriver on March 15, 2013, 10:28:44 AM

The wed-based mail reading method sometimes can provide tools we don't have in a dedicated email app! Are there any options for exporting that display or message from FF? I'm assuming you've already tried reading the message in Mail, or is that where it shows up as a file (icon) attachment? Even there, you might try right (control) clicking the attachment icon and see if you get something like a 'view as...' menu option. Mail tends to show multi-page documents as icons... or maybe that's just when creating a message!

Have you tried 'Printing' it as a PDF?
I just noticed, using Chrome, that it wants to use its own Print Dialog instead of the one in the OS. It sounds like your dialog is the 'standard' one the OS uses, however. If not, there should be an option to use the 'standard' dialog which has the "PDF" button in the lower, left-hand part of the window.

Using the 'landscape' mode might also help.

Or simply using Copy & Paste? Copy the data/text in the email display and Paste it into a word/text processor?

Title: Opening .dbt files with 10.6.8
Post by: sluggo on March 15, 2013, 11:06:24 AM

QUOTE(Xairbusdriver @ Mar 15 2013, 11:28 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

You're a fine resource sir! I got nowhere with Firefox, but printing via Chrome offered some other options, such as eliminating the margins. The combination of eliminating margins and using landscape was just the ticket.
I didn't note before that the attachment was within a web based email, not something that I opened in Mail. While the email was open in Firefox, I did convert to PDF and tried to find some suitable options there but had no luck.
Just for grins, I'll also try a copy and paste into an Appleworks document to see what I can do there. But at the very least, I'm now able to print up a report that the accountant should be able to read at tax time next year.
Update:
The appearance wasn't so great pasting into a word processing document, but opening up a blank spreadsheet in AW worked just fine. All categories and the information for each went into separate columns as they should be.
So today I've learned that it pays to keep more than one browser available as well as using a spreadsheet as I never have had to in the past.