Extract text from SHB files
To convert your SHB file to another format, you need Microsoft_Windows or other System software.
To convert other file formats to the "Shortcut File" file type, you need software like Microsoft_Windows or a similar tool.
The .SHB file is a legacy Windows Document Shortcut, historically used by Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office to create deep links into specific sections of a document. Unlike a standard LNK shortcut which points to a file, an SHB file uses OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) to point to a specific paragraph, cell, or page within a file.
Critical Warning: This format is infamous for its security vulnerabilities. In older Windows versions, the .SHB extension was hidden by default, allowing malicious executables to masquerade as harmless text files (e.g., invoice.txt.shb would appear as invoice.txt). Because of this, modern operating systems (Windows 10/11) generally block or deprecate these files.
Conversion & Use: You generally cannot "convert" an SHB file into a usable document like DOCX or PDF because the file contains only a pointer, not the actual content. However, users often need to convert .SHB to TXT (Plain Text) to safely inspect the internal path and see where the shortcut leads without executing it. For archiving, these should be treated as System artifacts.
Convert.Guru analyzes your SHB file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.
Users also converted SHP, SNAPFIREPROJECT, SNAPFIRESHOW and DIS files.
If you want to convert SHB file to CSV, JSON, XML, YAML, YML, TOML, INI, CFG, CONF, DAT, DB or SQL, you can use Microsoft_Windows or similar software from the "Document Deep Linking" 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 SHB, try Microsoft_Windows or another comparable tool in the "Document Deep Linking" 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 SHB converter.