Member Avatar for Amit Prakash

How to convert Snap shot(.snp) files to Excel in Microsoft Windows 2000

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.snp files are Access "snapshot" prints of a report (a fixed-layout, print-oriented format), so they do not contain native spreadsheet rows/columns. That explains why a straight, lossless conversion is rarely possible. The thread already shows one practical extraction route (see and ); here are alternative, more reliable ways to get usable Excel output depending on what you actually have.

If you have the original Access database or the report: export the underlying data instead of trying to parse the snapshot. Open the table or query that feeds the report and export it to Excel, or export the report's RecordSource. From VBA you can automate this; for example, exporting a query to an Excel 97–2003 workbook:

DoCmd.TransferSpreadsheet acExport, acSpreadsheetTypeExcel8, "MyQueryOrTable", "C:\Temp\Export.xls", True

That preserves the raw fields and saves cleanup time.

If only the .snp file exists: use the Microsoft Snapshot Viewer (or any app that can print .snp) and print to a virtual PDF printer, then convert PDF to Excel with a PDF-to-Excel tool or OCR if the contents are image-like. Commercial tools (Adobe/ABBYY) generally do a better job detecting table structure than generic OCR. This route trades manual copying for a two-step convert/clean workflow.

Other practical notes: ask the sender for a CSV/XLS export or the Access source if possible — that is the least error-prone fix. Expect to do some cleanup after conversion (repeated page headers, merged cells, multi-line fields). Modern Excel features (Power Query) can help split and normalize columns, and small VBA scripts can automate repeated cleanups. If Snapshot Viewer will not open the .snp, the file may be corrupt or not actually an Access snapshot.

Member Avatar for ro2bent

Open the SNP file and print it to a Microsoft XPS Document Writer. Open the document (it will open with Internet Explorer) and now you can highlight and copy/paste the text. If you paste it into Excel, it will go into one or maybe a few columns. Use Data -> Text to Columns to split the contents into multiple columns either Delimited or Fixed Width.

Member Avatar for naimjalil

THANK YOU! This tip helps me a lot... :)

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