.ODS

Introduction

ODS is the spreadsheet of the OpenDocument Format (ODF), the open standard from OASIS that is also ISO/IEC 26300. It is the default format of LibreOffice Calc and is read and written by Excel and Google Sheets. It is built the same way as the ODT text document.

.ots is a spreadsheet template, and .fods a flat, single XML file version.

Structure

An ODS file is a ZIP archive whose first, uncompressed entry is mimetype, containing application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.spreadsheet. The sheets are in content.xml: each sheet is a table:table made of table:table-row elements holding table:table-cell elements. A cell gives its type and value as attributes, such as office:value-type="float" and office:value="42", its formula in table:formula, and the displayed text in a paragraph inside it. Repeated empty rows and cells are written once with a repeat count.

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