Extract text from Design files (CDC)
To convert CDC files to another format, you need AutoCAD or other Data software.
To convert other file formats to the "Application Data Container" file type, you need software like AutoCAD or a similar tool.
The .cdc file format is highly fragmented, serving entirely different purposes depending on the software that created it. Most commonly, it acts as an AutoCAD DesignCenter Catalog file managed by Autodesk AutoCAD to index and store drawing blocks, layers, and layouts. Alternatively, it functions as a graphical programming project file for TinkerGen Codecraft, or as a strictly formatted telecom billing data file mandated by the Brazilian agency ANATEL.
These formats present severe limitations. AutoCAD catalogs use a proprietary Microsoft Compound structure that is inaccessible outside the Autodesk ecosystem. Codecraft projects are essentially renamed ZIP archives that trap code inside a specific IDE environment. ANATEL billing files are raw, fixed-width data dumps that are completely unreadable to the average user and lack native support in standard web browsers.
Because of this fragmentation, standard online converters consistently fail to process .cdc files correctly; they cannot guess which underlying data structure to parse. Converting these files usually involves extracting data rather than direct transformation. For programming projects, extracting the internal code to standard text formats is the goal. For ANATEL files, users typically need to parse the telecom data into CSV or XLSX to analyze phone bills in a spreadsheet. Our analysis tool reads the file's hex signature to determine if it is an OLE container, a ZIP archive, or plain text data. If we detect a supported embedded format, viewing the internal content or extracting the assets may still be possible.
Convert.Guru analyzes your CDC file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.
Users also converted CDR, ZIP, PDF, DXF, CAD and IGES files.
If you want to convert CDC file to CSV, JSON, XML, YAML, YML, TOML, INI, CFG, CONF, DAT, DB or SQL, you can use AutoCAD or similar software from the "Design Catalog & Project Data" 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 CDC, try AutoCAD or another comparable tool in the "Design Catalog & Project Data" category.
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 CDC converter.