Shapefile (ESRI)
What you are seeing — a consultant, an agency or a colleague sent you a zip, and inside it are files with the same name and different extensions. None of them open in anything you have.
Nothing is wrong with the files. A shapefile is not one file — it is a set that only means something together, and your computer has no application registered for any of them.
.shp is the geometry: the points, lines or shapes themselves, and nothing else. .dbf is the table: the rows and columns, and no geometry. .shx is an index that lets a reader jump between records. .prj is one line of text saying what the coordinates MEAN — which country's grid, which datum. .cpg, when it is there, names the character set the text is in.
The two that matter most are the ones people delete. Without the .dbf you have shapes with no information attached. Without the .prj nobody can say where on Earth the numbers point — and a reader that guesses will be confidently wrong by tens or hundreds of metres.
So: keep the whole folder together, and when you send it on, send the zip rather than the file that looked most important.
.dbf opens on its own, and LibreOffice Calc reads it for free.Drop the zip and read what the file actually contains. Free during the testing period · no account needed · without one, what we read is kept to teach the reader, names removed; sign in and nothing is kept.
Open the file you were sent →