Click the "Select File" button above, and choose your BWS file.
You’ll see a preview, if available.
Click the "Convert file to..." button to extract text information.
Convert BWS to another file type
To convert BWS files to another format, you need Brady Workstation or other Page Layout software.
Convert a file to BWS
To convert other file formats to the "Label Design File" file type, you need software like Brady Workstation or a similar tool.
About BWS files
The .BWS file format primarily functions as a Brady Workstation Label file. It stores barcode data, text layouts, and vector graphical elements for printing industrial safety signs, wire markers, and facility labels using Brady Corporation printers. A secondary but notable use case is the Bridge Scoring Database file. Used by bridge tournament scoring software like BridgePal, these files store player data and match scores using the underlying JetDB engine. Finally, a small percentage of .BWS files are BlindWrite Sub Code files, which store optical disc metadata for disk cloning tools developed by VSO Software. As a proprietary label design or internal database file, the .BWS format suffers from strict vendor lock-in. You cannot natively open a Brady label file in standard design software like Adobe Illustrator. Similarly, you cannot view a Bridge database without specialized scoring software. This restriction causes heavy friction when attempting to share label drafts for client approval or export tournament score data for web publication. For label sharing, converting the .BWS file to standard PDF, PNG, or JPG is the most practical solution. For database variants, exporting the data tables to CSV or XLSX is ideal. However, standard online converters universally fail to process these formats because the file structures are closed, proprietary, and highly undocumented. Because this file format is difficult to open or convert, often only the original software can properly read or export the data. If our analysis detects a supported underlying or embedded format, viewing or conversion may still be possible.
Convert.Guru analyzes your BWS file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.
If you want to convert BWS file to ISO, IMG, DMG, VHD, VMDK, VDI, HDD, QCOW, QCOW2, RAW, VBOX or OVA, you can use Brady Workstation or similar software from the "Industrial Label Design Storage" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….
To convert VFD, DMG, OVA, IMA, VBOX, ADF, PVS, VHD, OVF, ISO, DSK or IMG files to BWS, try Brady Workstation or another comparable tool in the "Industrial Label Design Storage" category.
The BWS Converter Story
The history of Convert.Guru began over 25 years ago in California with Tom Simondi’s file-format database. A former contributor to Space Shuttle development and a software pioneer of the 1980s, Simondi established a trusted resource for file type analysis that was even referenced by Microsoft Windows XP. Today, we use modern technology to process and convert thousands of file formats while continually improving our BWS converter.