Click the "Select File" button above, and choose your FDM file.
You’ll see a preview, if available.
Click the "Convert file to..." button to extract text information.
Convert FDM to another file type
To convert FDM Forms to another format, you need FormDocs or other Page Layout software.
Convert a file to FDM
To convert other file formats to the "Form Definition File" file type, you need software like FormDocs or a similar tool.
About FDM files
The .fdm extension covers two distinct file types that confuse users.
FormDocs or Outlook Form: Most commonly, this is a proprietary form definition used by Microsoft Outlook (Exchange Forms Designer) or FormDocs. These are vector-based electronic forms containing layout logic, text fields, and scripts. They are not compatible with standard viewers like Chrome or Adobe Reader. To view them without the original software, you must convert them to PDF.
Incomplete Download: It is also used by Free Download Manager to mark files currently being downloaded. These are effectively "placeholders" containing partial binary data (often MP4 or ZIP content). Users often find these and try to open them as video files. You cannot "convert" these in the traditional sense; you must either finish the download or, if the header is intact, rename the extension to MP4 to attempt playback of the partial segment.
Best Conversion Targets:
For Forms: Convert to PDF (Portable Document Format) for universal sharing and archiving. This flattens the interactive fields but preserves the visual layout.
For Downloads: Rename to the intended original extension (e.g., MP4, MKV, EXE) to test if the file is usable.
Convert.Guru analyzes your FDM file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.
If you want to convert FDM file to FMC, CSV, JSON, XML, YAML, YML, TOML, INI, CFG, CONF, DAT or DB, you can use FormDocs or similar software from the "Electronic Form / Partial Download" 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 FDM, try FormDocs or another comparable tool in the "Electronic Form / Partial Download" category.
The FDM 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 FDM converter.