How to open a .dta file
A .dta file is a Stata dataset, and like SPSS's .sav format it is proprietary. If you have received one but do not own Stata, you can still open it, read its labels, and export the data without installing anything.
What a .dta file is
A .dta file holds a Stata dataset: observations as rows, variables as columns, plus a rich layer of metadata. That metadata includes variable labels, value labels, storage types (byte, int, long, float, double, and string), display formats, and Stata's distinctive system for extended missing values (.a through .z).
Stata has revised the .dta format several times. Modern files (Stata 13 and later) use an XML-framed structure, while older files use a compact binary header. A good reader needs to handle both, because datasets shared in academia are often years old.
Open it in your browser (no install)
Drop the .dta file onto the statfile.tools viewer and it parses locally, showing the data alongside a variable view with every label and value set. Both the old binary format and the newer XML format are supported, including long strings and the full range of numeric storage types.
As with SPSS files, the parsing happens on your device. The file is never uploaded, so restricted or licensed data remains private. From there you can convert to CSV, Excel, or JSON, or build a codebook.
Other ways to open a .dta file
In R, haven's read_dta imports a .dta into a tibble while preserving labels; the foreign package also reads older files. In Python, pandas.read_stata handles most versions directly. These are reliable options when you are already working in a scripting environment.
For quickly inspecting a file or handing the data to a colleague who uses Excel, converting in the browser avoids the setup entirely.