Bring back the support for connecting to dBASE.
Access has always been about connecting to other data sources. Excel can still connect to dBASE files, but support for Access to connect was dropped. You can see from all the chatter, that there really is a lot of people that still use dBASE files for data transfer.

Done :-)
We have publicly announced that dBASE file support is back.
Check out our blog post https://blogs.office.com/2016/09/07/back-by-popular-demand-dbase-file-support-in-access/
Thank you for taking the time to submit and vote on User Voice requests!
Michal [MSFT]
106 comments
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Michelle Keener commented
I suspect that there are a lot more people who have been using and need dBase connectivity than Microsoft had any idea of. Regaining the ability to connect to dBase would solve many problems for users. Other options are extremely cumbersome or not workable at all. Please restore dBase connectivity.
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Harry Chen commented
Dear Microsoft friends, please remember to read this thread to hear what your customers are suffering. http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office_2013_release-access/access-2013-dbase-dbf-table-import-option/dedf1394-2e7d-4a47-b661-c10daea0c144?msgId=0916692f-5164-4c80-89f2-310afccc70b0&page=11
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Harry Chen commented
Keeping an existing feature of connecting DBF file should not cause extra cost on developing a new version of Access. I would love to see Microsoft hear the voice and put back the feature of DBF file connectivity.
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Michael Hummelgaard commented
I can only agree entirely. I need to export to DBF format many times each day. Industrial inkjets have used DBF format forever - and still do. And, no we cannot just change our inkjets. They do not all support csv or fixed length. All our import specs are set for DBF. And ODBC/ISAM are not an option. File in/file out in DBF. Only way.
On top of that Access 2010, often, has to run queries 2-15 times, before sorting is sequential on a key field. Amazingly poor in a DBMS. We have to check the sorting manually (with a special app) EVERY TIME to be sure it is in order. Come on MS. You can do better than that. Help us out here. Can't be so, that we all have to make each our solution for this. -
J. Austin commented
I wish your new CEO would read a couple of the forums to see how dedicated MS customers feel about removing functional capabilities that are used by many customers (dbf files, place holders, Outlook categories, etc. - the list is pretty long). Just how hard would it have been (would be) to add dbf file capability back to Access? Talk about negative advertising when it is not needed.
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Crystal commented
+1 +1
The structure of DBase didn't change so why did we lose the capability to read those files? We should be getting MORE data formats to pick from ~ Access is 'access'
In order to pull folks out of the 90s, we need to convert data ... so Access 97 too!