Extract text from SDA codebooks (CDBK)
To convert CDBK Codebooks to another format, you need SDA (Survey Documentation and Analysis) or other Text software.
To convert other file formats to the "Statistical Metadata" file type, you need software like SDA (Survey Documentation and Analysis) or a similar tool.
A .CDBK file is a dataset codebook generated by the SDA (Survey Documentation and Analysis) software, a set of programs developed at University of California, Berkeley for analyzing survey data. These files act as the schema or "dictionary" for a corresponding dataset, defining variable names, question text, and response labels (e.g., defining that "1" equals "Strongly Agree").
While .CDBK files are fundamentally ASCII text, they are formatted specifically for the SDA engine to parse and display on web interfaces. Users often deal with issues when trying to use these files offline; they do not open natively in standard office software like Microsoft Word or Excel. Opening them in a basic text editor often results in a cluttered, hard-to-read stream of metadata lacking the clean formatting of a published manual. Additionally, because the format is specific to academic research archives (like the Roper Center), proprietary tools often fail to recognize the extension entirely.
To make the codebook human-readable for sharing or citation, the best approach is to convert the .CDBK to PDF. This preserves a fixed layout suitable for archiving. If you need to copy variable definitions into a report or clean up the formatting, converting to DOCX or RTF allows for easy editing. For importing the schema into other statistical tools, converting to plain TXT ensures the raw definitions are accessible without encoding issues.
Convert.Guru analyzes your CDBK file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.
Users also converted SAV, SPE and PHD files.
If you want to convert CDBK file to CSV, JSON, XML, YAML, YML, TOML, INI, CFG, CONF, DAT, DB or SQL, you can use SDA (Survey Documentation and Analysis) or similar software from the "Survey Data Documentation" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….
To convert DBF, XML, SQLITE, XLSX, SQL, TSV, ACCDB, YAML, MDB, CSV, ODS or JSON files to CDBK, try SDA (Survey Documentation and Analysis) or another comparable tool in the "Survey Data Documentation" category.
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