Microsoft retired InfoPath on 14 July 2026. This is Microsoft’s published date, stated here as honest context — not a countdown to a sale.

If you’ve landed here, you probably have a folder — maybe a whole share drive — of InfoPath forms: expense claims, HR onboarding, inspection checklists, incident reports, supplier forms. And InfoPath has now retired. It’s a fair thing to worry about, so let’s answer it calmly and completely.

Your files are not deleted on that date

Retirement is about support and the software, not your data. On and after 14 July 2026, your .xsn form templates and your filled-in form-data .xml files are still sitting on disk exactly as they were. Nothing reaches in and erases them.

What actually changes over time is more mundane, and that’s the real risk:

  • A new PC arrives without InfoPath installed, and there’s no supported way to add it.
  • A Windows or Office upgrade drops the old InfoPath Filler.
  • A SharePoint site or server that hosted the forms is decommissioned.
  • The one colleague who still had it working leaves.

Any one of those ordinary events is the day a .xsn quietly becomes “a file nothing here will open.” The deadline just makes that day more likely, sooner.

Why the records still matter after the app is gone

InfoPath ran a lot of ordinary business: who claimed what, when, and who approved it. Those aren’t disposable. Records-retention policies, audits, GDPR subject-access requests, and legal holds all care about the data inside the form — not about whether the original app still runs. So “we’ll just keep the old files” isn’t enough on its own; you need to be sure you can still read them.

The one thing worth doing now: make sure you can still get the data out of your .xsn and .xml files — into CSV, JSON, PDF or plain HTML that any tool can open. Do that once, and the retirement date stops being a threat.

Good news for the technically curious: an .xsn is a Microsoft Cabinet (CAB) archive of open XML, and a form-data file is plain XML. There’s no proprietary binary and no encryption — so the data can be recovered.

Your options, honestly — including the free ones

You have real choices here, and we’ll be straight about all of them, not just ours.

1. Export from within InfoPath while it still runs (free)

If you still have a working InfoPath install, you can open forms and manually copy or export data. This is genuinely free and worth doing for a handful of forms. It gets impractical when you have hundreds or thousands of records, and it depends on InfoPath continuing to run — which is exactly the thing that’s going away.

2. Unpack the file by hand (free, technical)

Because .xsn is a CAB archive, a technically confident person can extract it (for example with expand on Windows, or 7-Zip) and read the .xsd schema and .xsl views inside; a form-data .xml can be opened in any text editor. This works, and it’s free. It’s also slow, fiddly per file, and easy to get wrong at scale — and it doesn’t produce a tidy, auditable archive on its own.

3. A migration project (bigger, costs more)

If your forms are still active business processes, you may want to rebuild them on a modern platform (Power Apps, or another forms tool). That’s the right answer for live workflows — but it’s a project, and it doesn’t, by itself, preserve the historical records already filled in. Migration and archival are two different jobs.

4. A local, read-only rescue tool (what we make)

XSN Rescue is built for the archival job specifically. It reads your .xsn templates and filled-in .xml records locally, on your own computer, read-only — your originals are never changed — and exports the field data to CSV, JSON and a readable HTML rendering, with an honest recovery report on every run. Nothing is uploaded and there’s no account.

For records-retention and audit specifically, the archive output goes further: from the same single pass it produces an archival PDF for every recovered record, a browsable index of them, and an estate-inventory executive report — the sort of self-contained archive an auditor or executor can open forever, with no InfoPath and no viewer.

Honest scope, so there are no surprises. XSN Rescue recovers the data and static layout. It does not execute or recover form code-behind, external data connections or user-role logic; digital signatures are surfaced but not cryptographically verified; and file attachments stored in InfoPath’s base64 envelope are decoded back into real files, while embedded content that is not a decodable attachment is preserved verbatim and marked as such. The recovery report states exactly what happened, per file.

A calm plan for the next few weeks

  1. Inventory. Find every .xsn and every form-data .xml across your shares. You can’t preserve what you can’t find.
  2. Protect the originals. Copy them somewhere safe and work only from copies. Never let a “conversion” touch the source.
  3. Get the data out into open formats now, while extracting is still easy — by whichever route above suits your scale.
  4. Keep a readable archive (PDF/HTML plus CSV/JSON) alongside the originals, so an auditor in five years can still open a record.

We’d genuinely rather you export early and never need us than lose the records. That’s the whole point.