How to open a .xsn file without InfoPath

Double-clicking a .xsn file gets you nowhere — Windows doesn’t know what it is, Office apps refuse it, and the program that created it is retired with no official viewer. Meanwhile the SharePoint form library it came from stops working entirely on July 14, 2026. The good news: the format is documented and fully readable.

Option 1: Render it in your browser (fastest)

1. Open the tool and drop your .xsn onto step 1. It’s parsed on your computer — no upload.
2. Add the submitted .xml records from your form library onto step 2. Each one renders as the filled-in form, using the template’s own view stylesheets — the same ones InfoPath used.
3. Preview free, then export the batch as a searchable PDF or an Excel workbook if you need the archive.

This route is the only one that gives you readable documents rather than raw files: layout, tables, and labels come through exactly as the form’s designer built them, and the first three records render free so you can judge fidelity against what InfoPath used to show before paying anything.

Option 2: Extract it by hand (no rendering)

A .xsn is literally a .cab archive with a different extension. Copy it, rename the copy to form.cab, and extract it — Windows File Explorer opens cabinet files natively; on a Mac or Linux, cabextract does it. Inside you’ll find:

This proves the files are intact, but it doesn’t give you readable documents — the views only mean something when a record is rendered through them, which is what option 1 automates. For a full tour of the contents, see what’s inside a .xsn file.

Option 3: Rebuild the form on a modern platform

If the form is still actively filled in (not just archived), the long-term answer is rebuilding it in Power Apps — that’s Microsoft’s recommended migration path. It’s a real project: worth it for living forms, overkill if you just need ten years of submitted records to stay readable. For the archive problem, use option 1 and keep the originals. Not sure which situation you’re in? The retirement triage guide settles it in a sentence.

Where to find the .xsn template and the .xml records

In SharePoint, an InfoPath form library is a document library with the template attached. The .xsn itself usually lives at /Forms/template.xsn inside the library — reachable by switching the library to the classic view and browsing the Forms folder, or via Library settings under advanced settings. The submitted records are simply the library’s contents: each item is one .xml file, so select-all and download gets the whole archive in one pass.

Forms that never lived in SharePoint turn up in two other places: network shares (many teams saved filled-in forms to a folder) and email attachments from the era when submit-by-email was common. The .xml records are the half that matters most — they hold the data — so gather those even if the template is lost. And do it before July 14, 2026: the files remain downloadable afterwards, but the people who remember which library is which tend to be harder to find than the files.