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How to open an .accdb or .mdb file on a Mac

Microsoft Access is not part of Office for Mac and never has been; a Microsoft 365 subscription includes Access on Windows only. So a Mac user who is handed an Access database has to go around the product. These are the options that actually work, most demanding first.

The options

  1. Windows in a virtual machine. Parallels, VMware Fusion or UTM plus a Windows licence plus a Microsoft 365 subscription. The only way to run the database as an application — forms, reports, VBA. Expensive and slow to set up if all you want is the data.
  2. LibreOffice Base. Cannot open Access files on macOS: it needs an Access ODBC driver, and macOS does not ship one.
  3. Online converters. Fast, but they work by uploading the database to someone else's server. That rules them out for anything confidential — client records, HR exports, anything under a contract.
  4. A viewer that parses the format directly. AccessLens is a Chrome and Firefox extension that reads .mdb and .accdb files (Access 97 through 2019) inside a browser tab on the Mac. Browse and search every table, and export a table to CSV or the whole database to one Excel workbook for Numbers or Excel. It requests no permissions, so it has no way to send the file anywhere.

Step by step with AccessLens

  1. Install it from the Chrome Web Store (works in Chrome on macOS; Edge and Brave can install from the same store), or from Firefox Add-ons in Firefox.
  2. Click the toolbar icon — the viewer opens in a tab.
  3. Drop the .accdb or .mdb onto the page, or click Open. Password-protected files prompt for the password, which stays on the machine.
  4. Pick a table, search it, and use Export → This table → CSV, or Export → All tables → Excel workbook to get every table in one file.

Just need the tables out of the file?

AccessLens opens .mdb and .accdb files (Access 97 to 2019, password-protected included) in a Chrome tab on your own machine. Browse and search any table, and export to CSV, Excel or SQLite. It contains no network code and requests no permissions, so the file stays on your computer.

Free: browsing, searching a table and exporting it to CSV, at any size. Exporting or searching every table at once is free up to 20 tables and 50,000 rows in total; above that it needs an optional one-time Pro licence.

Add to Chrome — free No account. No upload. Read-only: it never changes your file. Using Firefox? Get it from Firefox Add-ons.

Questions

Is there a Mac version of Microsoft Access?

No. Access has never been released for macOS and is not included in Microsoft 365 for Mac. Running it requires Windows, typically in a virtual machine.

Can I open an .accdb on a Mac without uploading it anywhere?

Yes. AccessLens is a Chrome extension that parses the file locally in the browser. It requests no network permission, so the database never leaves the Mac.